Some thoughts on auto-completion and auto-formatting.
At the BlueJ team, we regularly get requests for new features. Two of the most requested features are auto-completion (of method names, imports and fields) and auto-formatting (a.k.a. “pretty-printing”) of code.
We have had these discussion since the very first release of BlueJ. So far, I have always refused to include these features. Is it time to re-think?
So, I promised some updates on BlueJ development plans. Let’s see whether I can keep my good intentions at least for a day, and tell you something about what’s going on.
The most interesting new bit of functionality that we are working on for BlueJ is team work support. When this is done, student teams should be able to cooperate easily by using BlueJ.
Some people occasionally ask what we are planning to add or change with BlueJ in the near future.
Currently, we have no channel for sharing this information, so I might try to use this blog to keep interested people up to date and, at the same time, possibly get your feedback and ideas about what we are doing or should be doing.
Syntax colouring – the annotation of source code with different colours for keywords and other syntactic tokens – has become standard in just about all development environments. Yet, it often does not make sense.
I don’t mean to say that it does not make sense at all to use colour to annotate source code. On the contrary. What I am saying is that almost all syntax colouring systems colour the wrong things.