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Was wondering why isn't there an intelligent IDE? I mean the new Visual Studio 2010 is okay, you press tab and it helps you complete for instance the required keywords for an event handler. But i'm talking about something more intelligent.

Let's say I need to connect to a database. And there's about 5-6 lines of code that you need to write to be able to connect to that database. Why not have a popup or an advanced intellisense that inserts that code for you and all you have to do is change the parameters. Kind of like snippets in Flash but a bit more robust (snippets in Flash are very limited).

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Probably it's just wrong to use languages/libraries that would require 5-6 lines for something so common. – SK-logic Feb 28 '12 at 13:36
it's not wrong, it's just not the IDE function , if you want to connect to the database with 1 line, you can write a lib and use it. – jonathan Apr 13 '12 at 0:08

4 Answers

up vote 0 down vote accepted

... isn't there an intelligent IDE?

Because there isn't an intelligent computer.

We only have rudimentry computers. The best programming languages (in the real world anyway) require a Mark1 Organic Brain to tell it exactly what to do, how to do it and when to do it. Admitiably, they do all that very fast, but computers cannot think for you.

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Downvvoter : Whats with it? Do you have a computer that can program itself? Please do tell. – mattnz Nov 25 '12 at 0:02
up vote 3 down vote

Visual Studio already has the sort of code-generation you describe: code snippets, code generation for forms, code generation for unit tests, etc. And we've been doing sophisticated code generation in Object-Relational Mappers (ORM's) for years.

With a good, robust code template system like T4 or CodeSmith, you can create the same sort of custom code generation yourself, right inside Visual Studio.

Of course, once we have quantum computers and mind-reading headsets, you won't need any of those things anymore.

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What percentage of programmers use template systems like T4? – Antonio2011a Feb 28 '12 at 7:14
@Antonio2011a: About the same as the number of programmers who drink absinthe. T4 (and other similar templating systems) solve a specific problem. How many programmers use an ORM? Answer: The ones for whom an ORM meets their requirements. – Robert Harvey Feb 28 '12 at 15:59
up vote 1 down vote

Ummm... Try JetBrains: http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/

They've been doing this sort of thing for years with their Java IDE (IntelliJ IDEA), and have similar features for other languages (Objective-C, Ruby, Php, etc.) Resharper is a productivity tool for Visual Studio that does intelligent code generation, among other things.

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up vote 0 down vote

Was wondering why isn't there an intelligent IDE?

Because there is often a dozen ways to do something, and for the IDE to generate code, somebody has to think of those possabilities. So it would take Microsoft years to write the code required for an "intelligent" IDE to generate code based on functions, in the end, the programer would still have to provide basic information and many cannot even do that.

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