Code completion for the masses!

And then Tim Bray goes on to tell the story of an ancient (well, 1990) Search UI

The idea was that any time you clicked on something, the software tried to figure out a reasonable way to combine what you%u2019d clicked on with your most recent result

That is, code completion on on tree structured data - essentially dynamic xpath generation. I can only say that I really think this is the way to play. Only the structuring must be fast and nonrestrictive. Language does not follow hierarchies trictly. That why we like it so much. When logic is just too hard to come by, we say what we want to say in slightly incongruous ways anyway. This information is still useful and should be searchable. Posted by Claus at July 07, 2003 10:16 PM