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3:08:28
fiddlerwoaroof
You can overcome this with a lot of discipline, but it can be really tempting to just drill down through levels of dots to get the functionality you need.
3:09:14
fiddlerwoaroof
I don't think this is a sufficient reason to reject good development environments, but I think it's a downside of those environments people often don't think about
3:13:46
beach
Maybe industry should start thinking about the qualifications of the programmers that it hires.
3:17:58
aeth
can't do dot-based auto-complete easily in CL, anyway. (action foo ...) means you typed action already, unlike foo.action, which can be done when you start with a foo
3:26:59
fiddlerwoaroof
(I guess that's a sbcl extension, but I think the standard specifies searching all the symbols, rather than only external symbols)
3:43:43
fiddlerwoaroof
For example, if I do (MAKE-INSTANCE '<TAB>, there's enough information to know that I'm probably looking for a class name
3:46:08
verisimilitude
Joking aside, I support the idea of properly qualifying programmers; one method to get the idiots out would be corporal punishment for programming flaws.
3:47:42
beach
fiddlerwoaroof: Indeed. The main problem with autocompletion is to limit the number of choices to the relevant ones.
3:49:50
verisimilitude
That would require manual tagging of someone, and naive autocompletion gets most of the way there anyway, is part of the problem.
3:50:33
fiddlerwoaroof
For a lot of things, you could have a method with an eql specializer on the CAR of the form
3:51:28
verisimilitude
Still, someone would need to do some manual tagging for this at the beginning.
3:51:54
fiddlerwoaroof
Yeah, although things like "does the symbol name a class" can be determined somewhat automatically
3:52:11
verisimilitude
Right, I've not spent much time in Lisp lately, so I'd forgotten that terminology.
3:52:31
fiddlerwoaroof
And you could also do things like use declared argument types to narrow completion
3:52:56
fiddlerwoaroof
e.g. I've come across a couple functions that use a MEMBER type to specify which symbols are valid for a particular argument
3:54:12
verisimilitude
My system doesn't even have a working M-. and so I never found the autocompletion particularly lacking.
3:55:29
aeth
Yes. My M-. in CL also somehow broke. Idk how or where. It's sometimes annoying, but usually I can just grep and lose a few seconds so it's not really worth the few hours to fix it.
3:56:50
fiddlerwoaroof
(as everyone knows "works on my machine" is the best response to a bug report)
3:57:10
aeth
I do have a few elaborate macros where it's non-obvious to know where things are defined (since I assumed a working M-.), but they're my macros, so I know.
3:58:32
verisimilitude
I mostly use Lisp as a decent window into my computer, where I can perform useful automation, but typing a programming language into my machine to get basic computing feels more like a compromise than an ideal.
4:33:25
phantomics
verisimilitude: corporal punishment for programming flaws would also require manual tagging of someone
5:44:40
doulos05
Learning how to use irssi to read previous chats. I'm glad I'm in at least one active channel to practice in, lol.