I think autocompletion as a selling point for static language is underrated. With autocompletion I feel I type less than half the characters that my code requires.
It is not just about completing a word. The completion can be a pattern of several lines of code with placeholders where the IDE jumps and waits for you to enter one or two characters that it completes again.
The resulting experience is that things just flow. The IDE frees your mind from details like name spelling, api method list, exact language syntax and usual idioms.
And it is probably just the beginning. The completion is still pretty basic when you think about it. At some point maybe, IDE will switch to a rule engine to manage thousands of completion rules.
Autocompletion tools are getting pretty good as it is. IntelliJ for Java and Resharper for C# are unnervingly good about predicting exactly what I would have typed even for stuff like declaring method names.
ActiveState's Komodo has autocomplete for some dynamic languages like Python. Obviously its not possible to be as accurate as static type languages, but it helps a lot.
It is not just about completing a word. The completion can be a pattern of several lines of code with placeholders where the IDE jumps and waits for you to enter one or two characters that it completes again.
The resulting experience is that things just flow. The IDE frees your mind from details like name spelling, api method list, exact language syntax and usual idioms.
And it is probably just the beginning. The completion is still pretty basic when you think about it. At some point maybe, IDE will switch to a rule engine to manage thousands of completion rules.