alt Hacker News> Trawling around to find out where symbols come from has wasted a lot more of my time than unqualified imports have ever saved.
Why aren't you using an IDE with "navigate to definition" conveniently bound to something like middle-click or ctrl-click?
I haven't used a language/IDE combination without this feature in decades.
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The fact you’re talking someone with this frustration shows maybe there are people with use cases other than yours?
When IDEs do resolve this it tends to be because they built some index to look up these identifiers, which is likely taking up a portion of your memory. A language that statically tells you with an identifier comes from will take out less resources, and your IDE can collapse the import anyways.
So not sure why you feel so strongly about a language design whose ambiguity necessitates consuming additional resources to show you your little drop-down menu.
the difference is "i see this information at a glance" versus "i need to move the cursor to each unknown name to ask my ide a question". i think doing the command-click or even just hovering a bunch of unknown symbols is "trawling around". this goes doubly when doing code reviews; i'd prefer code make sense to my grug brain when i view it outside an ide. (sure, i can pull the code down to do an in-depth review in my ide, but the tax for unqualified names is starting to pile up...)
Sometimes I just want to open a project quickly and take a look without getting all dependencies installed and the lsp working and so on. Sometimes I want to look at another team’s project even though it’s in another language than my team works in, but I don’t want to set up that language in my environment.
This is particularly true with cpp projects, where wrestling with cmake and co just isn’t how i want to spend my time to answer a question about why something is slow or what a serialized object shape should be under various circumstances.