I find it frustrating how the speed of development that dynamic languages should offer gets significantly compromised by the lack of completions and other assets that IDEs would give you in their static counterparts.
It's not just about typing less – it's the productivity boost and plain fun you get by browsing APIs without constantly having to refer to a documentation that is not integrated with the editor.
To date all IDE + dynamic language combinations -which to be fair aren't that much- I've tried were:
- buggy
- slow
- clueless/overenthusiastic (as in showing all completions ever possible)
- or simply not as complete as, say, Eclipse + Java.
I'm aware that dynamic code analysis is not a trivial task. But one can't help wondering – is this piece of code really so hard to figure out?
So my question is:
Have any particular IDEs (or less all-in-one setups) achieved a totally outstanding support for a dynamic language, or is this still an 'unsolved' problem?
Best Answer
Smalltalk - a highly dynamic language - has always had a superb IDE, in which little things like automatic refactoring, SUnit (the grandparent of all *Unit frameworks), "who sends this message?", "who implements this method?" and the like were pioneered. So yes, IDEs can indeed support dynamic languages to a level that, until very recently, far surpassed those of statically typed languages.
S. Lott says that "Dynamic languages cannot have the same kind of code completion that static languages do. It's essentially impossible."
"Essentially impossible" in a theoretical, absolutist sense? Sure. In a practical sense? Not really. There are many ways to infer type for dynamic languages, statically (k-CFA, RoelTyper), at run time (PICs), and other methods, like using a programmer's recent history - "How Program History Can Improve Code Completion".
Certainly the Pharo and Squeak communities are very happy with their code completion tools.