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Comment by cobookman | Hacker News Reader

> Any other comparable language (basically with static types) would want to use would require an IDE too. Of course you can write C or C++ or Rust, etc without one, but you'll be as unproductive as writing Java without one (nothing inherently IDE-demanding that Java has compared to these).

I disagree on that one. I find writing c++ without an IDE to be doable. However with java the import statements are not human memorable.

Same goes for class names and variable names. In java everybody writes getFoo and setFoo. Which just gets annoying, and I personally feel that the protobuf lib does it right in there c++ bindings. foo(), set_foo(...).

Same goes for golang. Golang does a great job of having easily memorizable packages, but also allows for more complex git based urls.

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> However with java the import statements are not human memorable.

I suppose that depends on how many classes you need to import. I wrote a fair amount of Storm code (JVM/Java-based) and did all of the import statements by hand in vim (I don't think vim would have auto-completed by Java imports from a .clj file even if it had been setup correctly). Didn't seem that hard. I sometimes had to look at API docs for class names, but I'd have needed to do that anyway.

The only time IDE-based autocompletion would have been nice was when I was trying to read sample code. Since Java is so verbose, nobody writes import statements in their sample code. Required more googling than I'd have liked.

I started writing Java with no IDE; and mostly just used * imports; that worked pretty well (and I don't remember it being a headache at all). In IDE land (since, uh, I guess the first I used was called Roaster) automatic imports meant I could always use specific imports, which is a tiny bit better in my mind, but not worth ever doing it manually.

>I disagree on that one. I find writing c++ without an IDE to be doable. However with java the import statements are not human memorable.

Whereas C++ imports are? Except if you code all the relevant functionality by hand, or just rely a few std stuff. But then you should compare like to like (e.g. only using the Java analogue to std, utils, collections, etc).

>Same goes for class names and variable names. In java everybody writes getFoo and setFoo. Which just gets annoying

So? Expanding to getFoo/setFoo is something even Vim can handle, no IDE needed even.

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