Programming with lego bricks and code completion
Erlang is a fashionable programming language. The main benefit of Erlang is that it was designed with concurrency in mind. One high profile project based on Erlang was CouchDB. Well, no longer. Damien switched to Java.
Yes. It is a joke.
Nevertheless, some of his remarks are interesting.
Erlang lacks OO programming support, where the main focus is code reuse. Without OO you can’t build software like Lego bricks, mixing and matching and swapping out the parts freely.
It is sometimes amazing how the Lego-brick analogy is popular among… people who have never done serious programming. In practice, OO programming does little to help code reuse.
But the code completion in Java is so damn nice it really makes it easy to produce gobs of code quickly.
If the main problem you are facing as a programmer is to remember the name of the variables and the functions, be worried.
Montreal, Canada 
Follow on
Considering the ever-growing size of the Java API, code completion does come in handy. I would rather have a tool that auto-completed test cases and assertions.
But I’m confused by be worried. Do you mean: (a) that you should be able to remember the API or (b) that being so confident in the logic of the code you just dashed out is stupid? Or (c) your job will be outsourced because you’re just a code monkey?
Comment by Jason Adams — 1/4/2008 @ 16:00
Building test cases and assertions should definitively use a large fraction of your time.
If a significant fraction of your time is spent memorizing APIs, then maybe you are using a bad API or working on stupid problems. In either case, you ought to be worried.
Comment by Daniel Lemire — 1/4/2008 @ 16:16