If I may, I’d like to make a strenuous plea for my #1 wish-list item: autocomplete for dependencies.
Autocomplete won’t detect functions and variables in dependencies, let alone class names themselves, meaning to use code in another project you either have to have it all memorized or you have to jump back and forth all the time.
The lack of autocomplete for dependencies is perhaps the entire reason I can’t and don’t write truly modular code.While perhaps that’s a failing on my part, I’d guess it is also a stumbling block for many others.
I’ll tell you something from my experience, for example, which is that I crawl through the forums and the old posts and I find all this truly great stuff, and I’m left wondering, what happened to these things? Ignatz alone developed and shared tons of demos that other people could have picked up and used as the basis for hundreds of games. For goodness’ sake, he developed a basic FPS engine, which I’d wager is the #1 thing beginning gamers want to learn to make.
But what I don’t see on the forums, and I wish I saw, was people using and building on other people’s code. It happens a little but not much. I mean, I’d wager that if someone went back through all the old cool projects, and standardized them, and made them truly modular, Codea just might be left with a terrifyingly versatile user-generated game-creation API.
Going back and making all that old code re-usable is an idle fantasy of mine, tbh. I’d probably never do it, even if dependency autocomplete existed–who has the time?-- but I’ll definitely never do it without it.
I mean, you know, it’s discouraging to me that every project made by now isn’t using SODA. @yojimbo2000’s work there is stunning. But we’ve still got newcomers coming to the forums and thinking, “what this engine needs is a good standardized UI, and I’m gonna make one!” I was one of those people, once, and a new one came along just last week, as I’m sure you noticed.
I get it, though. I ran into problems trying to use SODA, myself. I’ve been trying to solve those problems in ways I can share with others. But if you look at the comments in my SodaSpec code, I recommend people cut-and-paste it into their projects, so they can make use of autocomplete as a learning tool for it, which is in fact what I also do with it. I wrote the code, and I can’t make use of it as a dependency because the dependency system lacks autocomplete.
The dependency system itself is great. And Codea is great. And on this forum you’ll find incredible examples of what it can do. But most of those examples went nowhere beyond the forums, and in fact went nowhere on the forums as well, and it makes me scratch my head all the time, wondering why. It could be because the code wasn’t modular enough. But it could also be that, even with perfectly modular code–like SODA–it was too hard for other people to really use it–it has been in fact too hard for me to use it–because of the lack of autocomplete for dependencies.
Whew.
Sorry to go on and on.
It might change nothing–newcomers to anything always try to reinvent the wheel, for a while, that’s par for the course–but it also might change everything. As is probably, I think, evident, I am humbly imploring the Codea powers-that-be to implement autocomplete for dependencies. 