Intellisense good or evil

Question

Is intellisense provided in most of the IDE's a good one or not. It surely helps in faster application development. Does it weaken the coding skills of a programmer?

Answer 1

This post might help answer your question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/352266/internet-and-intellisense-bad-for-your-memory

Answer 2

I don't think so. I mostly know what I want before I go looking for it in an intellisense list so it just speeds up development from my point of view. Also it exposes items you may not have known existed or had forgotten about ... further enabling you as a developer.

Answer 3

Quite the opposite. It frees the programmer of unnecessary tasks and thus strengthens the skills.

Answer 4

It depends really on the preference of a programmer, I don't use intellisense simply because textmate doesn't have it. When I was experimenting with Coda I liked the way that when you started typing a function it gave you the paramaters and their types in the bottom out of the way.

Overall there is only so much intellisense can help you, if you are starting to rely on it and just guess function names then maybe try not using it for a few days to see if you are relying on it too much or if it's simply speeding up your programming.

Answer 5

Anything that takes more of the load off me is a good thing (as long as it isn't harming the final product - and this isn't). I don't really understand why people are so hesitant about allowing the machine to do more work... that's what it's there for.

Answer 6

Good, of course! Why should I memorize the names of hundreads of classes and thousands of members? That won't make me a better programmer!