Yesterday I typed in some C++ code that called a function with two ints. Intellisense (auto-complete) helpfully told me that the first formal parameter was called "frontLight" and the second "ringLight". It occurred to me that I'm getting some semantic help here on top of the obvious type safety. It seems to me that the existance of this kind of support is tied to the static typing nature of C++.
I've always been interested in the psychology behind those heated "static" vs. "dynamic" (quotes to avoid another lengthy discussion about manifest, latent, explicit, ...) typing debates. So I googled "Intellisense static dynamic typing" and tried to get a view of the collective mental landscape of this subject. It appears that the threads that talk about Intellisense soon run dry. I'm wondering if this is because: 1) Intellisense is really just another crutch that does more harm than good? There were a few hardcore defenders of this position but not many. 2) Intellisense is really useful but hard to implement well in IDEs for dynamic languages? Can anyone comment on the status of Intellisense-like tools for dynamic-language IDEs? 3) Users of dynamic languages are always developing/debugging running programs where the current type of a variable is known and hence Intellisense is possible again? My own limited experience with dynamic languages (Ruby) is limited to edit-run cycles. Any opinions? Thanks, Andrew -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
