alt Hacker Newsthe 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...)
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jcgrillo • today at 4:14 AM
similarly, I can step through a program in the debugger and see how it works--or at least that it works--but the whole point of having a programming language in the first place is that (if I use it right) I can understand the program without running it
> 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".
Is it really "at a glance"?
In most languages either by convention or requirement the "import" or "using" statements are collected at the beginning of a file. Once you've scrolled down even a few lines, the context is gone.
Also, determining what exactly is bound where is decidedly non-trivial in many languages due to keywords such as "var" and "let", overloaded function/method definitions, etc...
Sure, a human can do this with 95% or better accuracy, but that 5% can be a killer during a complex troubleshooting session if you guess wrong.
That's why I strongly prefer IDEs and having a purely mechanical process to resolve the dependencies so I can know exactly what things are instead of hoping my intuitions were correct.