The way programming should be - easy

As developers, we spend most of our lives writing code - eight hours a day (usually more) at work; perhaps a few more hours at home and on weekends. In this kind of situation, a single incremental improvement in how we write code makes huge differences over time to our productivity, over all well being, and chances at achieving moksha.

In an ideal world we'd move ideas into code on a computer using our minds. We'd like to treat our code like putty, to be shaped into whatever our minds can imagine - and then reshape it as requirements change, of course :-).
Unfortunately, this isn't an ideal world, so we're forced to use the keyboard and mouse but we should never stop aspiring to the ideal of code-as-putty.

There are two common routes to this ideal, given that we're stuck with keyboards and source files:

1. the syntax and semantics of the language itself
2. tool support

Clearly, both help make life easier and just as clearly the level of tool support needed decreases with improvements in the language. That said, I'm yet to come across a language which wouldn't benefit from some amount of tool support. Remember, we're talking about incremental improvements, not silver bullets - a better 'rename' which ensures syntactic consistency is definitely an improvement over regexp based find-replace. Obviously, everybody has a different idea about which languages and tools improve productivity and to what degree, just as everyone has a different opinion about what constitutes 'well being'. This shouldn't prevent us from constantly moving to languages and tools which make our lives easier, yet I never see tools being discussed except during the odd flame war. We have come a long way since we crossed refactoring's rubicon in Java seven years ago, yet how many posts do we see out there about how we can do more with tools today?

Sometime ago, I'd posted a rant calling VS2008 a piece of crap. In his typically polite way, Ramesh pointed out in his post that provocative titles and rants aren't always the best way to convey one's message. He's absolutely right. So to that end, I'm going to start posting productivity enhancing IDE tips and tricks I come across as I write code every day. Posts will be short, something I can compose when I'm taking a break and getting a cup of chai or some fruit juice in the pantry. Three lines of text, a couple of screen-shots, that's it.

To start with it'll be all in VS2008+ReSharper as I'm currently developing in C#, but I intend to continue this series as I move from one language to another - and I welcome any suggestions or improvement anyone may have, whether it's Lisp, Erlang, Java, Ruby or C#. Anything which makes the lives of those on those platforms that little bit easier :-).

A little tidbit to get started - smart code complete when filling in parameters.

If you're using a method which takes a bunch of parameters, here's a quick way to fill them in without having to look up the param list for that method. Just position the cursor inside the brackets and hit Ctrl+Shift+Space and you'll get the most plausible option from the variables available. ReSharper looks at the types and names of variables in scope at that point to do this and is almost always accurate. Instead of looking up docs, you simply hit Ctrl+Shift+Space a few times and your parameters will be populated. In the shot above, even though all the parameters being passed are strings, ReSharper correctly guesses their order based on variable names.

ReSharper also helpfully pops up the parameter list in cases where methods are overloaded to help you decide how many times you should press Ctrl+Shift+Space.

IntelliJ does it again - this time for Ruby

I'd been doing my Ruby work in Jetbrains' IntelliJ 6 using the open source IntelliJ Ruby Plugin. Frankly, it wasn't a patch on developing Java or C# on any half-way decent IDE, including Visual Studio, which just barely manages the half-way decent mark. The plugin could do syntax highlighting correctly most of the time - you occasionally had to add round braces to clarify stuff or it would get confused - and it could run tests. But it couldn't run just one single test in a suite. If you hit the shortcut for run in a test file, it would run all tests. How annoying is that? It also had a few helper menus to do stuff like script/generate and things of that sort. That pretty much summed up its features.

Well, today I upgraded to IntelliJ IDEA 7.01. All was well, I continued where I'd left off a few minutes earlier when I was working in IDEA 6. I write some code. I go to a test. I hit 'Run' and look at the output panel expecting to see the results for the ten tests in the test case. I see just one result. Did I run the wrong test case? A quick check and then I realise what's happened - only the test in which the cursor was positioned has run. It dawned on me that maybe Idea 7 had more to offer than I'd expected.

A second later I was trying out my favourite IDEA shortcuts to see how they worked for Ruby. Shift+F6 (Rename object under cursor), Ctrl+Space (intelligent autocomplete) and Ctrl+Alt+V (Introduce variable) seemed to work fine (I didn't test 'rename' very extensively though).

Intelligent Autocomplete

Extract Variable

Alt+F7 (Find usages) worked, sort of, because it went and found an entirely wrong usage and didn't find another I knew existed. Ctrl+Alt+M (Extract Method) unfortunately doesn't work. Yeah, I know, RDT crossed refactoring's rubicon for Ruby early in 2007, but it looks like it'll be a while before it shows up in production IDEs.

Now I can look forward to some of the stuff I've been missing when developing in Ruby. Like expressive (and consequentially longer) method names and renaming classes and methods when I understand their usage better. I've been using IDEA since it was in version 4, and every single release has made me go 'Whoa, that is so neat' when I looked at some new feature. And they've done it again with IDEA 7.

Incidentally, I have looked at the competition. I've tried Aptana (I've been using RadRails for a year) and have looked at Netbeans. They're OK, but in terms of the overall package, I find IntelliJ the better option. Of course, the $500 price tag attached to IDEA is way too expensive for someone earning in Rupees, so yeah, for my personal stuff I still use Eclipse+Aptana, but I don't enjoy it very much. As for TextMate, I'll consider it when I get a MacBook, provided Apple does something to shed the 'unfriendly toward developers' image it's sprouted since the release of OS X Leopard.