[plt-dev] IDE and completion

On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 5:05 PM, Shriram Krishnamurthi <sk at cs.brown.edu> wrote:
>
> > For professional programmers, it was unbearable. We found it is
> > impossible to resist typing the "([" after typing LETREC. Old habits
> > die hard, so we took the entire feature out.
>
> There's a simple solution to this, which we did in the prototype
> WeScheme editor we built last summer, and which I noticed Eclipse does
> too: if you type ([, and that's already in the buffer, the editor just
> moves over the characters (ie, it's like hitting "right-arrow until
> you're past the parenthetical character you typed").  Works great.
>
> It obeys an important principle, which is that a person who knows the
> syntax and is comfortable just typing it can continue to do so using
> muscle memory.  This way they get the best of both worlds.

Yes, I agree.