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Stuck in the past indeed, using IDEs was already a thing in Windows 3.x and Mac OS classic, exercise for the reader when they came to be.

Or better yet, the development experience of using Toga in Mesa/Cedar (1987).

http://toastytech.com/guis/cedar.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4

Or Smalltalk, Interlisp-D or Lisp Machines for that matter.

The time a language must be usable with Notepad alone is long past due.



The problem with non-greppable code isn't that "you should use an IDE". I use rust-analyzer and I dislike non-greppable code.

One concrete issue I ran into is that when cleaning up a list of imports, I can't use Ctrl+F to find out which ones are unused, since I can accidentally remove a trait which is never used by name but only imported for its methods. And I can't count on rust-analyzer's unused import detection working 100% of the time. And it's bad that some methods (for example the infamous `Read` or two `Write` traits) are inaccessible unless you add a trait import (which rust-analyzer sometimes knows how to add when I press Ctrl+.).

To me, the overarching value of Rust is locality of reasoning, and clearly indicating nonlocal reasoning in explicitly-readable and machine-checkable ways (eg. the `Cell` family of types). Trait methods are nonlocal reasoning, and they aren't clearly demarcated (a trait import behaves as`use module::Trait::*` but isn't written that way in the source code). If you're opposed to wildcard module name imports, you should be opposed to wildcard trait method imports.


That only shows how much it is lacking versus proper IDE experiences.

IDEs for other languages provide plenty of capabilities to code navigation, no need to go Ctrl+F.




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