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Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

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Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#521

Post by zelphirkalt »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #488

1. Memorization (i.e., knowledge) beats tooling every time. 2. Pain is the most effective way to learn. I was a 90s kid, still just young enough to have my parents tell me to go get out a paper dictionary when I asked "what does this word mean?" It's amazing how much better it "sticks" when you have to stop, get up, open a book, and find the entry. With a minimal vim setup, I find that I just know Linux, the language…

Use it or lose it (or never gain it in the first place).

In a past job I have worked with other engineers and even some, who were senior engineers, however, I was the only one, who was able to write a proper shell script. This knowledge came in handy also for writing CI files, which somewhere tend to have shell commands in them.

You don't do it yourself, you don't learn it. Simple as that.

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#522

Post by n144q »

zaran wrote: post #90
jasonpeacock wrote: post #12

You should try turning off those features yourself for at least a month and see what happens ;) You’ll learn the answers yourself, much better than us trying to explain them. You’ll learn where all the reference docs live for your language, libraries, and frameworks, and along the way you’ll learn more by actually reading the docs. You’ll learn the value of good project organization and file naming, and explicit impo…

Autocomplete is more for discoverability than saving on typed characters, letting you rely less on documentation and more on the actual interface you're interacting with

Also about less context switching. If autocomplete gives me a full method name that I kind of remember, it saves me a trip to the browser and coming back, which saves a lot of time and avoid a family of errors when they add up.

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#523

Post by lttlrck »

raydev wrote: post #406
daltonpinto wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course that are good things and maybe I wrote in a too much harsh way. Linting features and autocompletes are nice, also autocomplete features are nice to have. The issue that I pointed mostly resonates with the idea that depending on LSP is the big issue. I personally use Neovim with minimal stuff, I run lint and tests manually and not automatically, because it feels to me like push notifications taking my attent…

> I reviewed many code written by junior people, and very often I see people adding code in random places that later may let the application to be hard to follow and everything "seems fine" to them. As someone who got their start in edit/Notepad, it wasn't "productivity boosts" that made me bad at code architecture when I was inexperienced.

I'd wager it wasn't the lack of "productivity boosts" either?

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#524

Post by lttlrck »

mithametacs wrote: post #248
continuational wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good riddance? Why spend your life doing something a computer could do for you? The goal of programming is not to write code (however much I enjoy that part), it is to solve problems. I don't think copilot et al is anywhere close yet though. They are occasionally useful when working with popular APIs you use very rarely, or when you need to write some very repetitive code. Other than that, I feel like it's mostly a m…

I don't want to write any code. I want to think about the design of the program and have it pop out of my head fully formed. The latter gives me dopamine. The former gives me carpal tunnel.

For myself, the code is the journey. There are times though when I'm not fully invested in the problem, that I really just want to skip that part.

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#525

Post by scarface_74 »

rnewme wrote: post #454
scarface_74 wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the AWS SDK for Python. Everything is “logically organized” am I suppose to remember every method on every class? The C#, Java, Go and other SDKs are the same (they are all auto generated by the same definition file) It doesn’t matter how well structured a codebase is, once it gets large, you’re not going to remember every method on every class

Of course, but there is a difference between programing using sdk/library/api and some glue, and actually engineering some self standing solution, and everything in between that. I belive blind programer wouldn't fare well in fast churn ci/cd every minute startup, but would be amazing in embedded space with multi year release cycles.

How many large applications are made with no dependencies or frameworks?

In another life, I worked on a SaaS app around railroad car repair billing.

These are the industry requirements.

https://public.railinc.com/sites/default/files/documents/CRB...

And this doesn’t include addendums, regulation updates, industry norms, extra requirements by clients etc

No matter how well structured the codebase is, it will become large and had a lot of classes.

Not to mention the underlying .Net framework

Have you worked with either the iOS or Android SDK? Do you expect people to know that entire SDK and a sufficient large codebase?

Autocompleting IDEs are not a new concept. It’s been part of Visual Studio since the mid 1990s.

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#526

Post by jebarker »

I don't use most of these features other than go to definition. I find popups deeply annoying. I've tried using other features such as autocomplete but I've never found it very useful. I think it's due to the type of work I do. I rarely write lots of new code and instead spend most of my time debugging existing code and making relatively small changes. Go to definition seems to be the only navigation feature I find useful. However, I use a debugger almost continuously to monitor the state of running code and I have a similar question as you for all the developers that never use a debugger - that seems weird to me now.

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#527

Post by xmprt »

modernerd wrote: post #441
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird to me that you group LLMs in with code analysis based LSP autocompleters. Normal autocomplete is basically a context-aware AST browser. It lets you navigate the program semantically instead of file-based. LLMs are token predictors.

The parent did the same, but of course they're different. The spirit of the question seemed to bundle LSP/autocomplete/LLMs under tooling that some do without.

The way I use LLMs a lot of the time is to simply let copilot complete the method parameters that I was already planning on typing or autocompleting the fields of a struct. It's barely a step over LSP/autocomplete tools but because LLMs have access to more context and aren't restricted by the things they can autocomplete, they work in more scenarios. LLMs get things wrong occasionally but it's usually easy to catch and LSPs can fix those errors.

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#528

Post by 65 »

Newer fancy things like code completion are a little faster, but the thing I care about most in my IDE is if I can command+click for type definitions.

For example, writing Python scripts for Fusion 360 modeling is almost impossible if you aren't able to find all the methods and type definitions as Autodesk's documentation is pretty terrible and doesn't list most methods.

If your IDE doesn't have type definition support, being productive with certain APIs with terrible documentation is impossible.

If it's all vanilla code, then this isn't as much of a problem. So the need for better IDEs comes with more complex code.

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#529

Post by ooooooooldguy »

After 40+ years of programming, you tend to retain some things. I started out in 1984, so that means in 40 years, "me" of today will be in the year 2064. I cannot fathom what coding will be like then. But if I compare today vs. when I started, there are remarkably few differences. GDB has been my debugger for decades. The IDEs are better, but the UNIX CLI is still essentially the same. Bells and whistles don't help you solve problems, they just give you something to tinker with in between the real ideas, IMHO.
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