Userlevel?

[rinzwind]

Its a cruel world outside... it's hard to win or be heard when giants like Google and MS spend huge amounts of money on advertising, marketing, attending events, creating own events, ...
MS even gives away the complete Visual Studio now for free to students, hobbyist and small companies... Academy edition. That will hurt all other programming tool developers who depend on one product to sell... MS makes money in area X, and uses it to create a market position in area Y (xbox anyone? a money well for years...). If you want Googles money or involvement they need to get something out of it themselves... in usage or reputation. Google does use Python and supported Firefox for looks. To be fair... Visual Studio is regarded as one of the best IDE around for years. Complex and bloated it is..

To get involvement from others... LC should side a little bit with common programmer paradigms like dot notation and intellisense/autocomplete (which needs dot notation to be able to make the most of its job), a powerful IDE and things like... if you say you support iOS, make sure the app looks and feels iOS.

[Mikey]

<rant deleted/>
I respectfully disagree.

[FourthWorld]

autocomplete - yes! Know anyone in the community who could add that and submit a pull request?

dot notation - I discussed this with Mark Waddingham once; not going to happen, he feels it's too much of a departure from the flavor of our language.

[dave.kilroy]

I know I'm in a minority in this community in liking dot notation because (I guess) it reminds people too much of object orientation - so I'm not going to start that hare running again...

BUT

Autocomplete would be a really good thing, is worth spending a bit of time thinking about and not dismissed out of hand

We are prepared to put time and effort into documentation and bug reporting so why not autocomplete? We have a 'champion' for improving documentation why not one for this?

Mark, Jerry and anyone else who has messed about with the LC script editor can you advise on how humungous a job this would be? Maybe it is something that could be done in smaller bites rather than one big gulp - and therefore the kind of thing where a community approach might be ideal?

Dave

[richmond62]

Well; this is not quite progressive disclosure, but it is a way of restricting the end-user from getting too
big for their boots:

http://forums.livecode.com/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=27328

[bn]

Hi Dave,

GLX2 by Jerry Daniels had/has Clairvoyance. i.e. autocompletion. It worked pretty well. I used to use GLX2 and it was better than the script editor at that time.
It is still here
https://bitbucket.org/mwieder/glx2/downloads
Mark Wieder maintains it to some extend. But since some things don't work well on Linux he has put it on hold.
So autocompletion is not very hard to implement. It is just more code for the script editor to work on and I would guess for very large scripts it might slow things a bit down. How easy it would be to bolt this on the current script editor I don't know.
At a time I looked into the source code of GLX2 for color formatting and a script editor is a code beast you have to tame. Additionally to complicate things you can not edit GLX2 using GLX2. You have to use another script editor. Then you have to switch editiors to see if you got it right. It is a bit of a pain.
Currently when using Atom for widgets I find autocompletion a huge help. Thanks Peter Brett for writing that Livecode extension for Atom And it would be a really nice addition to Livecode's script editor.

Actually there is live coloring of Livecodes script editor. Autocompletion is a close relative of live coloring, comparing while you type against a list of language tokens and variable names.

And did you know that Livecode's script editor has autocompletion built-in on the character level? You hit a key on your keyboard and magically that character appears on screen. Not bad for a start into autocompletion.

Kind regards
Bernd

[richmond62]

You hit a key on your keyboard and magically that character appears on screen.

No? Surely not?