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Comment by raducu | Hacker News Reader

I mainly use java, but why would any developer ask another developer what a function returns, when the person asking can just check that in 2 seconds using an IDE, why ask another developer?

I'm genuinely curious.

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- Not all IDEs show method signatures. - Not all languages have IDEs developed specifically for them. - Some IDEs require configuration/plugins to have that feature. - Some IDEs will give you method signatures for Standard libraries, but not custom ones. etc.

If an IDE exists that does indeed return such information, not using it is using the wrong tool for the job. And in almost all cases, it does. I can't think of a major language that doesn't have a jetbrains ide that does such things. If people want to spend time manually looking up signatures and manually formatting their code in whatever editor, fine. But if they are lazy and don't do this work, then blame it on not wanting to use a proper IDE when one exists, they are not doing their job and frankly, shitty engineers.

I can’t think of a single semi mainstream language that doesn’t have some type of plug in for VSCode.

But we are talking about the return value. While because of the crazy way that you have to instantiate Boto 3 in Python, an IDE can’t give you intellicense and you have to look up the docs to know the arguments, you can still assign the response to a variable, put a breakpoint on the call and see the response.

Alternatively, you could use the REPL.

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