Hacker News Reader

Comment by muzzio | Hacker News Reader

How did you handle things like import statements? That's really the biggest thing for me: if I'm working in a large project, I don't want to have to think about what package some really obscure utility is before using it.

Losing Shift+F6 refactoring is a little annoying, but definitely not something that makes programming Java impossible. Autocomplete might get a little hairy as well if you're referring to classes that exist in Jar files too, or am I wrong about this?

As for everything else, using the CLI for source control and building is something I do anyways, even when using an IDE. At least with Gradle, that is. As long as some of those issues have solutions, though, I think this might be possible. Maybe I'll have look into it a bit more.

View on HN

Decent Java IDEs handle import statements automatically. (And can also organize them for you)

Many people don't like Eclipse but I find the Java-oriented distribution it pretty decent for an IDE. Auto-complete is handled well, and searching through classes/types is also easy. (Knowing the shortcut keys helps)

As for imports, when you start typing a class name that isn't currently imported or in scope, you can use auto-complete to select which one you want. There may be multiple matches from multiple packages if you are searching for a class name of `Result`, so you can select the `org.foo.someframework.Result` and the IDE will add the import statements for you.

In general, I haven't really had much trouble with Java and an IDE, even in large projects with a huge number of dependencies.

I haven't really tried IntelliJ but from the feedback I've heard, it's a great IDE as well.

Like I said, it's been a few years, and the project I was working on was a smaller project, ~1000 lines of code.

I try to minimize imports, and am not touching them often. I'm very considerate of what I'm adding to a codebase, so I don't mind the extra space in my head. Also keep reference docs for the language and libraries on hand or accessible, to alleviate some of the need.

And I consider frequent renaming to be a sign that I hadn't thought out the problem well enough before starting. When I see a true need, I use Multifile Find (& Replace) in Sublime, multi-step process for audit followed by action.

And I've always found auto-complete's to be more frustrating that a saver of time, especially those that would fire on whitespace, so disable them or put them under a secondary keymap.

I'm sure the IDE saves some time, for many, but all the reasons people use them are mostly annoyances to me. Though there are still some merit, like having an embedded debugger and intelligent index of signatures.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com