I acknowledge that this will be unpopular, but ...
Those of us who are fossil grumpuses already think IDEs often allow people to write code they don’t think enough about with the idea that issues will be caught by someone else in code review. This, at least, is what I’ve observed over the last few years.
Something that writes the code for people and people basically “code” by doing a series of micro-code-reviews seems really crazy to me for any application that isn’t just fluff. Just look at what autocorrect has done to average incorrect-words-per-sentence. One of the problems with predictive text generation in general is that in isolation the output can seem very sensible even if it’s gibberish.
So as an IDE skeptic in general, I’d be very curious to try this tool out, if only to see how they deal with that.
[I spent years and years using VC++ and other tools and it was actually this feeling of not really knowing anything that drove me away from it. Etags/Cscope/Grey/actually-reading-code was what I replaced it with..]
> Just look at what autocorrect has done to average incorrect-words-per-sentence.
The problem with autocorrect is that it changes what you've written after the fact, without user input. This on the other hand is autocomplete, so if it suggests gibberish, you still need to explicitly accept it. If you do that, chances are you would've written gibberish in the first place.
As pointed above by the other comment, autocorrect's issue is that it sometimes forces a correction on you (unless you disable that). On the other hand, there are many words I could never dream of spelling correctly without looking up, but that I know get perfectly. Sadly, you don't notice those, but only notice it when it goes wrong.
Similarly, imagine going to type a common piece of code such as `if __name__ == '__main__':` or `def __init__(self):` at the start of a class, and have it automatically suggested. Obviously you can manually create snippets for each one of these, but that's much more effort.
I can see an interface similar to Gmail's new smart completion, or fish shell, that just shows you a suggestion in the background.
Gmail smart completion is more akin to a template, like giving you an empty class or an empty main function. Its utility (at least in my experience) hasn't gone much farther.
The example you link (from Zsh, not fish) is a fancy looking history autocompletion: in bash, just press Ctrl+r.
The parent has a point: I've spent time working with absolute beginners in programming and the first thing I was teaching them was to ignore the IDE "smarter autocompletion" and suggestions. For typing faster, sure; for suggesting anything else, not so clever.
Just a correction, my example was from a zsh plugin which imitates a built-in fish feature. Also, said feature is different from ctrl+r, which all 3 shells still have.
This one suggests possible completions as you type, so it's a passive feature, compared to ctrl+r which is more active and requires explicit action to work.
And yes, I agree that the whole purpose is to write faster, not to write smarter. I'd maybe add cleaner too, because unless you auto format your code, people often don't write the best by default.
Those of us who are fossil grumpuses already think IDEs often allow people to write code they don’t think enough about with the idea that issues will be caught by someone else in code review. This, at least, is what I’ve observed over the last few years.
Something that writes the code for people and people basically “code” by doing a series of micro-code-reviews seems really crazy to me for any application that isn’t just fluff. Just look at what autocorrect has done to average incorrect-words-per-sentence. One of the problems with predictive text generation in general is that in isolation the output can seem very sensible even if it’s gibberish.
So as an IDE skeptic in general, I’d be very curious to try this tool out, if only to see how they deal with that.
[I spent years and years using VC++ and other tools and it was actually this feeling of not really knowing anything that drove me away from it. Etags/Cscope/Grey/actually-reading-code was what I replaced it with..]