> Auto-completion is an editor feature, and support for auto-completion in text-mode editors is not a problem,
Which mighty text-mode editor would that be where auto completion is not a problem? I use Vim and Emacs on a regular basis and it's very much a problem except for cases where it's handled by external tools(eclim, gocode, vimclojure).
> though I don't use it as I hate auto-complete with a vengeance. If you need to type enough for auto-complete to matter, your language and/or your identifier names are messed up.
Programming languages benefit a lot from auto-complete. The only people against it are people who couldn't get it to work in their choice of environment. I have zero inclination to type "validates_numericality_of" or "http.ListenAndServe" or ...
> Re-factoring and code generation are features I expect of the editor and/or external command line based generators respectively, and there's no reason for a heavy IDE.
Please refresh your memory. I said VS is a good IDE and you said a solid CLI is far more productive. I am not interested in your rant. I am interested in what does CLI do better than the IDE, particularly VS or Eclipse.
> I can understand people grab onto IDE's if forced to deal with ridiculously verbose languages like Java or C#, possibly. Yet another reason to stay away from these languages.
Oh man. My environment doesn't have reliable autocomplete. Let's pretend only verbose languages need autocomplete. Yay.