I often encounter this when I am helping out someone who is new to programming and learning it for the first time. I'm talking about really new newbies, still learning about OOness, constructing objects, method calls and stuff like that. Usually, they have the keyboard and I am just offering guidance.
On the one hand, the autocomplete feature of the IDEs helps to give them feedback that they are doing it right and they quickly get to like and rely on it.
On the other hand, I fear that early dependence on the IDE autocomplete would make them not really understand the concepts or be able to function if they one day find themselves only with a simple editor.
Can anyone with more experience in this regard please share their opinion? Which is better for a newbie, autocomplete or manual typing?
Thanks for the input everyone!
Many answers seem to focus on the main use of autocomplete, like completing methods, providing methods lookup and documentation etc. But IDEs nowadays do a lot more like.
- When creating an object of List type, an IDE autocompletes to new ArrayList on right hand side. It may not be immediately clear to a newbie why it cannot be new List, but hey it works, so they move on.
- Filling method parameters based on local variables in context.
- Performing object casts
- Automatically adding 'import' or 'using' statements
and much more. These are the kinds of things I mean. Remember I'm talking about people who are doing Programming 101, really just starting. I have watched the IDE do these things which they have no idea about, but they just carry on.
One could argue that it helps them focus on program flow and getting the hang of things first before going in-depth and understanding the nuances of the language, but I'm not sure.