Autocompletion as a tool for learning

February 4, 2013

This time last year I was in the process of getting in to XNA with C# on PC, it was how I spent my spare time back then. Year year I’ve spending a large amount of time with Ruby on Rails. I’d say that in many ways I’m enjoying Rails more - partly because I can see how it includes a broader skill set (HTML, CSS, JavaScript…). I’m finding it harder to learn though. There is a need to be continually connected to the internet just to look up the syntax and error messages that come with every minute of work. With C# I didn’t have a book but I did have Visual Studio.

Visual Studio has one big bonus over my current setup - real code completion.

This made experimentation as a learner a huge amount more successful. It would always be guessing at what you might want to do - working away to beat you to it. This not only made it faster when you’d got the idea but it helped enormously when you didn’t quite know what you were doing. As long as you got the start right it would often point out the rest (with the help of some educated guessing).

In terms of the languages themselves there’s very little in it - they are quite similar to look at (although I would say that I find C# more readable). It’s just the tools available that set them apart. I’m getting to grips with it but I think that it will be a little while before I can write my own code rather than just adjusting and piecing together code from various tutorials.