Things I Love About IntelliJ IDEA: Smart Intentional Programming Support

Intentional Programming or "Coding by Intention" is a style of code authoring where, rather than creating low-level parts of code (the building blocks) and then writing the higher-level code (the orchestrators) to bring it together afterwards, you start by writing the high-level code, referencing methods and data that don't yet exist, building up a complete view of the big picture, and then implement the lower-level functions needed to make the big picture work. The main benefit, as you can probably see from my description, is that you get the big picture right and then shape the details to fit, rather than getting the details "right" and then making the big picture fit. **

IntelliJ IDEA has always had great support for coding by intention. It was one of the first 'wow' moments I had when I started using it in the early 00s. Some people have probably never coded without automatic importing, but for those of us who had, the pop-up question "Do you want to import java.util.Properties?" was like black magic. The ability to create a method based on a sample invocation was also in IntelliJ from the very early on, and it was quite revolutionary at the time.

What I love about IntelliJ's intentions is that they really do make the product seem intelligent. You get the impression that the IDE knows just as much about your code as you do, perhaps even more. A great example of this is if you use intentional programming to put() an entry into a non-existent Map and then use IDEA's 'Create Field' intention to create the map.



IDEA guesses (based on the fact that you are invoking a method called put() with two arguments) that maybe the field you want to create is a Map, so it makes that its first suggestion. But it also goes the extra step of suggesting type arguments for the K and V parameters on the Map interface that match the argument types in your intentional code, so that the whole type declaration will be complete simply by your pressing Enter.



Seeing as I've described how IDEA figures this out, it doesn't seem all that magical, but it's actually really useful. IDEA saves you from having to type nearly anything about the new field except perhaps to initialise it with a suitable Map implementation, which is actually just as easy as typing "new " and then hitting Ctrl-Shift-Space.

So, what if you try the same trick with Eclipse?
Eclipse has intentions, but compared to IDEA they're kind of brain-dead…



So Eclipse will make you a field with the right name, but it just declares it with a type of Object. So you have to go up the top and type in the type that you actually want to use, including the type parameters for a Map, yourself. Is that really intentional programming, or does it just save you from copy-pasting the field name?

Another example of IDEA's type-aware goodness can be seen by comparing the expansion of IDEA's "iter" template with Eclipse's "fore" template. Both produce the same Java 5 for-each loop, but IDEA's combination of type-aware template completion and smart name suggesting results in far less typing than the corresponding Eclipse template.

The JetBrains guys are so mad about intentional programming that they've dedicated a whole page of their documentation to showing of their many "intentions".

** If you want to, you can read more about coding by intention here