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Feb 24

“Those who coded, also coded”

IDE, Java, Tech Add comments

I had a strange dream last night. I won’t go into the details of my warped conciousness, but will talk about one small piece that flashed by.

At one point I was coding using IntelliJ IDEA Eclipse 12.5. As I started to write some code, a panel changed to say “Those who coded with API FOO, went on to do X, Y, Z”. The dream-like, better looking, Dion, then clicked on Y and a bunch of skeleton code was done for me.

Although this is a little out there, I do always come back to the fact that it feels like there are thousands of developers doing their own thing. As a profession, each project is making its own mistakes, and I don’t think we have avenues and ways to learn from eachother. Sure, there are design patterns, and practices which we sometimes share, but isn’t there more?

If there was a way to capture our experiences, it would be great. E.g., in some small ways…. say I started to tie together Tapestry and Spring. My IDE could see that I was doing this, and knows that someone in my social network has also done this, and shows/does this for me. Roll on the AI IDE! ;)

8 Responses to ““Those who coded, also coded””

  1. Emmanuel Pirsch Says:

    This is a cool idea…

    However, I don’t know how one could implement this. The plugin would have to “understand” the context in which the API is being used. It would also have to be able to delimit exactly what is the pattern. Which is not as easy as it is to know that someone who bought a book also bought books X, Y and Z.

    The same idea could be useful event if it’s not shared… There is always some coding patterns that this kind of plugin could detect… A bit like codesense but with auto-learning.

    It is certainly something that would be interesting to explore.

    One problem I could see with that is that what makes a pattern useful is the documentation and “rule” for when it is applicable. A plugin could “easily” learn what is done, but not why it is done.

    But then we could all get sued by Amazon or Microsoft (clippy anyone) ;-)

  2. Emmanuel Pirsch Says:

    This is a cool idea…

    However, I don’t know how one could implement this. The plugin would have to “understand” the context in which the API is being used. It would also have to be able to delimit exactly what is the pattern. Which is not as easy as it is to know that someone who bought a book also bought books X, Y and Z.

    The same idea could be useful event if it’s not shared… There is always some coding patterns that this kind of plugin could detect… A bit like codesense but with auto-learning.

    It is certainly something that would be interesting to explore.

    One problem I could see with that is that what makes a pattern useful is the documentation and “rule” for when it is applicable. A plugin could “easily” learn what is done, but not why it is done.

    But then we could all get sued by Amazon or Microsoft (clippy anyone) ;-)

  3. Nick Says:

    I hope tools like that never exist. Think of what they’ll do to hourly rates! :)

  4. Nick Says:

    I hope tools like that never exist. Think of what they’ll do to hourly rates! :)

  5. Alan Green Says:

    Let’s see… version 12.5, up from Eclipse 3 and IDEA 4.5, let’s call it 8 versions at 18 months each, so your vision was twelve years into the future. What language were you coding in? :)

    (PS: Brilliant idea! Go get a patent! Ooops, too late – you already told the world)

  6. Alan Green Says:

    Let’s see… version 12.5, up from Eclipse 3 and IDEA 4.5, let’s call it 8 versions at 18 months each, so your vision was twelve years into the future. What language were you coding in? :)

    (PS: Brilliant idea! Go get a patent! Ooops, too late – you already told the world)

  7. Laird Nelson Says:

    Neat idea. Although the tool is quite deficient in other ways, ArgoUML had something a little bit like this in the last version I used. Various “advisers” would crop up to let you know if you were falling into design traps. They weren’t, as far as I know, collaborative in any way, but the idea was a good one.

  8. Laird Nelson Says:

    Neat idea. Although the tool is quite deficient in other ways, ArgoUML had something a little bit like this in the last version I used. Various “advisers” would crop up to let you know if you were falling into design traps. They weren’t, as far as I know, collaborative in any way, but the idea was a good one.

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