I am trying to identify the point in time where code completion (autocomplete/intellisense/whatever) was first introduced in IDEs and would appreciate any pointers.
By code completion here I mean a feature within the editor that suggests methods or functions based on the code that was already typed, and I am interested in programming language related completions (not word processor style completion).
I remember seeing it in Visual Studio and Microsoft Office in the early-nineties, and I don't remember at what point it was introduced, or whether it was actually available in DOS-based IDEs like Turbo Pascal or Turbo C++. On a hunch, I would guess that this was probably introduced in Smalltalk.
For those wondering, I need this information for a research paper and wasn't able to find a credible answer online.
The first IDE that comes on my mind is the IDE of Visual Basic
The Wikipedia article on IntelliSense has a history section and indicates that the first use was in 1996.
VB, Smalltalk, Emacs, Think Pascal, Sun's Forte.
Maybe it worked in some of the early Xerox stuff who knows.
I am quite sure Turbo Pascal had some of these features, and that was even before Windows existed.
Turbo Pascal had auto-indent (woo!) but nothing you'd call auto-complete I don't think.
The first time I ever witnessed auto-complete was circa 1985. It was another pascal development system, with a strange name—maybe it was Alice—at any rate I think it was a woman's name. The editor did auto-indent, auto-completion of control structures (no more typing BEGIN and END), and even some form of syntax coloring. It might have been the first time I saw colors in a code editor.
The screen was stunning! Bland code was suddenly vibrant.
Alas, the product disappeared pretty quick. It was real buggy and drove everybody nuts. It seemed like nothing like it showed up until many years after that.
Edit: It was indeed called Alice, by Looking Glass Software, and I found some info on it here.
Related
I've been programming in python and C for a little less than a year, now. I switched from OSX to Ubuntu about a month ago. I'm learning C++, and most specific (non-beginner, I.E.: an SFML tutorial I'm using) tutorials that I've seen talk as if I use an IDE. I've used Textwrangler (OSX), gedit (Linux), and nano (Both; With built-in syntax highlighting and other extras turned on) for programming, along with the terminal and "make" so far, and I'm perfectly happy with them. I would use emacs, but I really don't like the way it looks. Should I use an IDE for C++? If so, why? Honestly, I'm just scared of being a ctrl-space'ing heathen. Thank you for any responses, and take the previous sentence with a grain of salt.
Short answer: Use an IDE if you feel comfortable with one. Don't use an IDE if you don't feel comfortable with one.
To really answer this question, though, we should probably look what using an IDE gets you. Here's the Visual Studio interface for C++:
(source: msdn.com)
The first thing you notice, of course, is the code windows with the pretty highlights. However, that's not the IDE; that's just the text editor part. The rest of it is what's really important. Visual Studio includes a debugger, a file/project manager, a compiler, support for source control... the list goes on. The first letter of "IDE" is the most important one - integrated. It includes everything you need to develop in one neat package.
However, this has its downsides, too. Maybe you don't like VS's text editor. Then, you have to have two windows open, and use the IDE only for debugging, compiling, and source control, wasting most of the screen space. Maybe, after a while, you start to think maybe GCC optimizes your code better, so you start using that. Eventually, the "integrated" part of IDE goes out of the window, and you're using only a few features of the product. At that point, it might be more productive just to find replacements for everything.
Of course, there are extensions and plugins for some of these things, but the point is: an IDE is generally only useful if you spend all or most of your time in it. If you like the entire or most of the IDE, great. If you don't, then use something else, whether that's another IDE or a bunch of command line tools or something else.
Addendum: I used to use Visual Studio, and then moved to Linux with Vim, gcc, and gdb. I work with SFML a fair amount in personal projects, and I don't feel that an IDE is especially suited to it in any particular way; I do just fine with the command line tools. The tutorials are most likely written that way because most people begin coding with an IDE, and SFML attracts a lot of beginners.
I wish to get a quick feeling for how much “copy and paste” coding we have, there are many tools for C# / Java to check for this type of thing. Are there any such tools that work well with VB.NET?
(I have seen what looks like lots of repeated code, but wish to get some number to help me make a case for sorting it out)
Update on progress.
I have just tried Simian.
It does not seem to be able to produce a nicely formatted report I can sent by email
It does not cope when the names of local variables, or parameters etc may have been changed, e.g it just matches on lines of text being the same.
Clone Doctor does not support VB.NET (only C# and VB 6 and lot of other)
October 2010: VB.net added to langauges supported by CloneDR
Clone Detective for Visual Studio only supports C#
SolidSDD - Source Code Duplication Detector only supports C, C++, C# and Java
DuplicateFinder is open source, but otherwise looks very match like Simian, e.g it just works on lines of text
ConQAT - Continuous Quality Assessment Toolkit seems to have a clone detector that works for VB.NET (not tried it yet)
Gendarme is a bit like FXCop and has a AvoidCodeDuplicatedInSameClassRule rule, this looks very promising, as it avoids the problem of working at the text level. Just tried it, it is the best solution so far, pity it does not search with a greater scope.
Before claiming that this question is a duplicate, please check that the other question addresses VB.NET, as a lot of tools that work well for C# don't work so well for VB.NET. (However it would not surprise me if this question is a real duplicate)
CodeRush 11.2 introduced a new feature called Duplicate Detection and Consolidation (DDC)
http://community.devexpress.com/blogs/markmiller/archive/2011/11/29/duplicate-detection-and-consolidation-in-coderush-for-visual-studio.aspx
Make sure to check out the options for it as well, as you can have it run when so many lines are changed, certainly time has passed, etc.
They've posted some decent videos on the DevExpress site too.
Simian: http://www.redhillconsulting.com.au/products/simian/
[I'm the author of CloneDR ("Clone Doctor").]
CloneDR is parameterized by a full grammar for the programming language in question. So it doesn't just match lines. Rather, it can find clones which are syntactically well-formed, with variations that are more than just identifier changes, regardless of where they stop or start in a line.
The engine on which CloneDR rests, The DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit" is a tool for analyzing large scale systems in any programming language, and uses language descriptions to drive the analysis. DMS has a wide variety of language front ends already available.
Presently it has VBScript and VB6 (as dialects of "Visual Basic"). It doesn't have VB.net, but that would be pretty straightforward to do given the DMS infrastructure and our experience with lots of other languages.
So, CloneDR could do this just fine, with a small bit of effort on our part.
EDIT October 2010: VB.net added as a language CloneDR can process.
Atomiq supports vb.net amongst other languages, and the results are nicely presented.
JetBrains published console tool set Resharper Console Tools to run duplication analysis. Once installed it allows you to do the same analysis as TeamCity does and generate duplicates report locally and even include duplicates search into custom build process with MSBuild. This tool does exactly what you need. More details you can find here at JetBrains blog post
Try Simian:
Simian (Similarity Analyser) identifies duplication in Java, C#, C, C++, COBOL, Ruby, JSP, ASP, HTML, XML, Visual Basic, Groovy source code and even plain text files.
I once saw an impressive demo of Pattern Insight; its CP Miner may be what you’re looking for: http://patterninsight.com/products/cp-miner.php. It seems to be language-independent, though I couldn’t find anything explicit about languages other than C/C++.
Roll up your sleeves and write your own parser to use it with CPD?
See the question for the tools I found.
I think Xcode is a good IDE, but having used Eclipse for Java development in the past I am quite underwhelmed by XCode's code completion and error/warning feedback. (Most of the time, XCode seems to simply try to match the beginning of a text fragment to "words" in the same document, without even using type information to try to determine the appropriateness of a suggested completion.)
Does anyone have ideas or tricks to make XCode approach Eclipse's cleverness, or to realistically develop Cocoa apps with other IDE:s than XCode?
EDIT: Worth keeping an eye on this: code.google.com/p/objectiveclipse/
The good news is, Apple’s working on the problem. One of the goals of the clang compiler project is to create a reusable parser which can be used for better code completion and refactoring support. Indications are that this has borne fruit in the latest Snow Leopard seeds.
Quite simply: no.
You can do almost everything by hand using your favorite text editor but it's not at all recommended. Try designing interfaces without Interface Builder for example.
My advice would be to just stick with Xcode and learn its way of doing things. Yes, it will be different and sometimes might not be "better" in your Eclipsed eyes. Console yourself in the fact that Apple's managed to release some great products using Xcode.
My personal experience is that, each time I use Xcode, I find a new trick which I can add to my bag. Xcode is far more full-featured than what you might think at first (or second) glance.
I've long voiced my rants about what's wrong with Xcode (and what's not wrong with Xcode). But you really don't want to use another tool. And without breaking NDA: Xcode 3.2 with SnowLeopard: Hooray. (Compared to what we have; not compared to what we might want.)
That said, to your original question about code completion, I personally turn off auto-completion in favor of on-demand completion. I find it far more useful and less distracting. In the Code Sense panel, set "Automatically Suggest" to "Never" and make sure the other two options are selected ("Show arguments in pop-up list" and "Insert argument placeholders...") This will do completion in a pop-up box when you hit Escape, making it easy to scroll through looking for what you want. I find that I have to type a lot less this way, especially for methods that are not unique for many characters. 80% of the time, it's highlighting the right thing already.
I have certainly felt your pain — as an experienced Java developer and frequent Eclipse user, I've wished for the same features myself. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of anything that fits the bill. I don't think there was any satisfactory resolution to this SO question, either.
However, I think you'll be quite happy with the improvements to Xcode code completion coming in Snow Leopard — it's vastly smarter about filtering the list of possible completions. Also, there are new conveniences for coding, such as inserting a starting bracket when you forgot one, etc. To my knowledge, there is still no predictive compiling like Eclipse, though.
Is anyone aware of an IDE other than Eclipse that supports predictive compiling and warning/error reporting? Does Eclipse itself support the feature for languages other than Java, such as C++? I'm led to wonder whether the fact that Java is built with independent .java files rather than .h and .c/.cpp/.m files makes it simpler to predictively compile. Also, anything compiled with gcc requires a little more care and attention than the comparatively simpler javac command. Any thoughts?
Check out JetBrains' new IDE called "App Code". It's still in the Early Access Program, but even with the Early Access bugs it is hands-down better than xcode 4.
http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/
emacs and/or vim
Xcode does have some context awareness, when you are sending a message to an object it will generally have the "ESC" list pull up meaningful arguments.
One thing I strongly recommend is looking into text macros. These are not really type aware, but they can save a ton of typing - for instance, after #implementation type "init" and then hit control-. (period) to activate the text macro. It will fill out a whole init method for you. You can create your own, or override the existing macros.
Does anyone know of an alternative IDE for Sybase Powerbuilder? It feels pretty clunky, after working with VS2008 and Eclipse.
If not, has anyone successfully worked with this language outside the IDE? I'm not against using a simple text editor, but I find edit-import-regenerate-test-export-edit is clunkier than simply using the Powerbuilder editor.
To date, the only tools I have had any success with are:
PowerGen, for builds (with NUnit and CruiseControl.NET)
ConTEXT, which has syntax highlighting for Powerbuilder
PBL Peeper, which has some interesting features not present in the IDE
EDIT: I added a bounty to draw some wider attention to the question. It would be a very nice thing to have, if it exists.
EDIT: Well that was disappointing. The bounty apparently did not cause even 1 new person to look at the question.
None that I'm aware of, although you could probably use a source control tool, edit in your source control repository, and Get Latest Version from the PB IDE to shorten your text editor cycle. Be warned that there are hacks required to edit anything over 128 ASCII. (My guess is that this is to allow everything Unicode to be source controlled in the most restrictive source control tools.)
As Paul said, PB12 is coming with based on the Visual Studio shell, and will include things like collapsible code blocks, Intellisense, etc.... However, for PB12, this will only be used for WPF targets and a few .NET-type targets (like assemblies), last I heard. Win32 targets will continue to use the "classic" IDE.
Good luck,
Terry.
P.S. Thanks for the PBL Peeper compliment.
The PowerBuilder IDE is clunky, but I don't think developing completely outside the PowerBuilder IDE is a good idea. I think there are just too many dependencies right now.
However, the IDE for PowerBuilder 12 will be built using Microsoft's Visual Studio Isolated Shell so it ought to be much better when that is released. Also, I believe they'll be doing away with the PBL format which ought to make source control much easier to work with.
Certainly something to watch.
What I do is right-click the object and edit source. Then I copy the text and paste it into Notepad++ to edit. I copy and paste back to PowerBuilder, then I can save and see any errors. I've got a fairly decent User Defined Language for PowerScript if anyone's interested.
Added:
Please be aware that I've seen the PB Source editor corrupt DataWindows. They were all large DataWindows. To be safe always export DataWindows to edit.
One tool that will most probably make your PB experience way better is Visual Expert, which provides a good source browser. Such a tool should have been integrated into the PB IDE a long time ago, IMHO. Only problem is that it's not free, as opposed to the other tools you mention.
Regarding using external source editors, you can probably take advantage of OrcaScript, which is a scripting language that lets you perform actions such as export and import of PB objects from outside of the IDE. It will require some effort, but you can setup a basic dev env using batch files with ORCA scripts and some additional external tools. However, this setup will lack any visual editing capabilities, which means no (feasible) GUI or DW work. If you're mostly into NVOs, it could work. But then if that's the case, why use PB in the first place?...
I too have heard PB12's use of VS will be limited to some .NET stuff, which will probably benefit only a very small portion of the PB programmers community. I'm afraid the rest of us are stuck with the awful IDE for years to come.
Other than exporting the source and editing it I don't know of another IDE for PB. One problem you may have is that the exported source contains a lot of syntax that is not documented in the manuals. The PB IDE generates this code but there is no support for creating it by hand. I think you are stuck with the PB IDE
In my modest five Years of experiences starting with Powerbuilder 5/6, now using PB 10, I tempt to :
build my own browser from the classdefinition object based on Powerbuilder
tried to use autohotkey in order to open datawindows comfortable (we have several thousands in the project and i am two-finger-driven)
truly investigated in the idea using an external editor/IDE suppoted by an autohotkey script which is undermined by sybase allowing only mouse-click-usage of PB
using Visual Expert which is neither a truly integration in the IDE, nor is really worth in analyzing datwindow/powerscript interaction
ending by build hopes on PB12 Visual Studio, which lacks - depending on compatibility issues - ...
... i came to the conclusion that there will be no chance in improving Powerbuilder to an state-of-the-art language
In my philosophy - I obtained during those years - I distinguish between two types of OOP-oriented languages:
the one that award using object-orientation like C#, Python, Ruby (C++) etc. and very much the Java-Eclipse/Netbeans-Universe does
the other one that punish using object-orientation like Powerbuilder and the old Visual Basic, for example (which is causative the OOP-Idea comes afterwards and is "plugged in").
Especially the demand that all object should always be compiled (regenerated) and that you could't work with ancestors and descandants concurrently makes it painful to use real OOP.
...In memory of the good old Unix(Solaris)/C++ days...
I was researching a replacement solution that would be similar to PowerBuilder and I came across two that caught my eye.
The first was 'React Studio' https://reactstudio.com/ which I found via Alternativeto.net .
And the second was from an ad at the top of some Google searches but it was similar enough and looked good enough at first glance for me to want to take a closer look at it, and it's called 'Servoy' https://servoy.com/ .
Still researching but I currently have React Studio at the top of our list.
The TextPad editor has a syntax definition file for PowerBuilder 6.x contributed by anr#aon.at that I downloaded for free and customized several years ago. It works fine for later versions (including 8), doing keyword color highlighting on PowerScript srx files. Editing large source files in PB could get it to crash so it's usually safer, faster and more convenient to export to srx file, edit outside the IDE then re-import.
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I know and have Xcode, but I was wondering if there were any other complete development environments that support Objective-C? I'm not looking for solutions with vim or emacs, nor editors like BBEdit that support syntax highlighting, but a full fledged IDE with:
code completion
compilation
debugging
refactoring
Extra points for being cross platform, supporting vi key bindings and supporting other languages.
Note:
I've updated and accepted my answer below as Jetbrains has released Early Access for AppCode, their new Objective-C IDE. Since this has been a fairly popular question, I thought it worthwhile to update the information.
I recently learned that Jetbrains the make of my favorite IDE (Idea) may support Objective-C (though it is unclear how much it will work for iPhone/iPad development). See the thread here for early discussion on this.
In the last year or two, they have started adding additional language support both in their flagship IDE as well as specialized IDEs (for Ruby, Python, PHP). I guess this is just another step in the process. I for one would love to have another option other than XCode and I couldn't think of one that I'd love more.
This is obviously vaporware at the moment, but I think it is something to keep an eye on.
This is now a real product, albeit still in Early Access. See here for a the blog on this new product, which will give you pointers to check out the EAP.
UPDATE: AppCode has now been released and offers a true alternative to using Xcode for Objective-C and iPhone/iPad/Mac development. It does still rely on Interface Builder for layout and wiring of GUI components and uses the iOS simulator, but all coding, including a slew of refactorings, smart templating and static analysis, is available through App Code.
Textmate is an editor like BBEdit but it has the ability to run commands such as compilation, debugging, refactoring (though it will do so via XCode). It also has code completion.
In addition, you can write your own commands for Textmate that you can then run.
I have been searching for something like this that does NOT run on mac for quite a few months now. Unfortunately I think that due to the relative obscurity of the Objective-C language that nobody has ever bothered producing such a full featured IDE for it. Until now, and we only have Xcode.
Using JBuilder I fell in love with the auto-completion and displaying the function 'hints' on the screen while I type. I am that sort of person who remembers the 'ideas' better than the actual syntax and really benefits from knowing right then and there that the code I typed was correct, not having to find out a minute later at compile time. And then to have to try and figure out if I just misspelled something, or if I truly made a conceptual error due to a misunderstanding of proper use of the language. Code completion and hints have always saved time on this for me.
I know some people may look down on this and say the feature is unnecessary if you know what you're doing, but I never claimed to be better than anyone else.
I may have to just give up and try and get OS X running on my PC. Which doesnt bother me in the least, just the rebooting to go back and forth to windows. I've tried to run it virtualized under VMWare but XCode kept crashing :( That reminds me I am going to google 'leopard vmware' and see if any progress has been made in that area.
Another problem in designing a full code-completion system with objective C is that the syntax is a little more forgiving, I dont know the exact technical term (strongly typed?) it is much harder to say exactly what sort of object belongs in a certain parameter and ANY object can be sent ANY message whether it implements that function or not. So you can spell a function name wrong, but it doesnt necessarily mean you made a syntax error... maybe you mean to call a function of that OTHER name and you just want nothing to be done if the function is not implemented by your object.
That's what I would really like to see for Objective-C, is an IDE that once it notices you are sending a message to an object, it displays a list of methods and function definitions that the object is known to accept, and walks you through filling in the parameters.
I think you would waste less time by sticking with Xcode rather than looking for another IDE if you want to develop for the Mac (or iPhone).
Apple made a lot of effort to kill any competitor in that area to make sure any developer wanting to develop for the Mac platform use Xcode and only Xcode.
It might not be the best IDE but it does work well and it is the IDE developers at Apple are using. Somehow it does its job. The frameworks and the documentation are very well integrated.
I use TextMate a lot and also SubEthaEdit but they are not full IDE as you’ve described above.
Best Regards.
Check out JetBrains' new IDE called "App Code". It's still in the Early Access Program, but even with the Early Access bugs it is hands-down better than xcode 4. I've been using it for commercial iPhone and iPad development.
http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/
I would like to second Troy's answer and note that JetBrains has AppCode in early access, so you can try it for free. It has the familiar UI of their other products, and yes, it supports vi! So far it has been very good. I have run into a few issues, and a few vi-isms that don't work quite right, but it is still better than suffering with Xcode. I do text editing with syntax completion in AppCode, but switch back to XCode to get into the GUI builder which is actually quite good in Xcode.
If you are an old vi-guy like myself, it is invaluable.
The short answer is: No. There are thousands of IDEs but Xcode is the only one which you seriously can name IDE. I suggest you have a look at the tries of GNUStep (in form of Projectcenter, Gorm) and then you can imagine the state of affairs.
I believe KDevelop is the only full IDE that supports Obj-C, but I'm not even sure how fully it supports it, having never used it myself. Worth a shot, maybe.
There are a few programmers text editors that support Objective-C, but I like Editra, mainly because I also write Python on Windows\Nix and it has great features. Editra runs well on all platforms and has a nice plug-in that supports Mercurial, GIT, and Subversion if you need them. Another nice thing, its written in Python. Editra Home
Found another, though it sounds less than ideal:
ActiveDeveloper - doesn't appear to have active support (last update was in 2006). Mac only.
KDevelop sounds like it only supports Objective-C syntax and only through its C support. I'm going to check it out anyway.
Textmate has a couple screencasts for Objective-C (here and here). It is Mac only, but otherwise looks pretty good. It is hard to tell from the screencast how strong the integrated support is as it seems to just have a lot of scripts to handle the code. Also, I can't tell if it does true code completion or just expansion for snippets.
So it doesn't look like there is anything out there that hits everything. I'll probably do most of my development on Mac, so I'm thinking I'll try out TextMate with XCode to see if it is any better than straight XCode. I'll take a quick look at KDevelop.
Thanks.