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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Intellisense 3 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • Perl actually does have intellisense. It's just not supported by a big bloated IDE with dropdown boxes that helpfully guess what you could possibly mean as you type. Instead, Perl uses huffman coded operators like grep, map, split, $scalar = @array , interpolation and so on.

    > When your language is so verbose that it needs machine
    > assistance to be usable, you've got a crappy language.

    Yep. A good language has intellisense for both reading and writing code. Giving you a crutch to write volu

    • Perl actually does have intellisense. It's just not supported by a big bloated IDE with dropdown boxes that helpfully guess what you could possibly mean as you type. Instead, Perl uses huffman coded operators like grep, map, split, $scalar = @array , interpolation and so on.

      This is a little disingenuous, isn't it? The examples you're quoting are all built-ins, and I doubt that most people use intellisense for such items. IME it's really useful for keeping on top of libraries, particularly those you don't use very frequently. Even so, isn't one of the great features of Perl people often tout the ubiquitousness of 'perldoc -f' for built-ins and 'perldoc Module' for libraries? Wouldn't it be great to have to remember if, for instance, the constructor for a DateTime object took a hash vs a hashref? Or, since good intellisense implementations in Java also include inline javadocs, whether DBI's bind_param is 0- or 1-based?

      If I used these items every other day, sure I'd remember them without any help. But I use a LOT of libraries -- benefits of CPAN and working with any language with an an active open source community -- and I don't think I'm unusual in not being able to call up the details of every API on demand.

      Actually, one of the main benefits I see for something like Perl 6 is to be able to create an IDE as good as IntelliJ IDEA [jetbrains.com] for Perl. I didn't like IDEs before this one, even for Java, but it's a great tool that helps you code rather than codes for you.

      • This is a little disingenuous, isn't it?

        Not really.

        The examples you're quoting are all built-ins, and I doubt that most people use intellisense for such items.

        That's precisely my point. One of the reasons why Intellisense is almost a requirement for programming in C/C++/C# and Java is because of the type system, and the over complexity of the programming model. With Java, you have big class hierarchies, interfaces, and dozens of classes with dozens of methods. For example, if I want to iterate

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