Autocompletion and function/method discoverability

juliohm
Thu, 31 Jul 2025 21:59:11 +0000
Internals & Design

Object-oriented languages make use of the obj.fun syntax for function calls. If the user types obj. and then presses TAB, he/she can immedietly learn about the available functions.

The Julia story is more challenging, but I wonder if we could ever provide tooling to improve the discoverability of functions for beginners. I’ve asked this question on Zulip and am asking it here now for greater visibility.

Could VSCode or some other tool in the ecosystem display the most relevant methods for the obj upon typing some special character? For example, obj# and TAB to trigger a list of functions and their most relevant methods in the REPL?

Assuming that the answer to my previous question is yes, could this same tool automatically rewrite the expression into the fun(obj, ...) syntax that Julia expects positioning the obj correctly in the list of arguments?

16 posts - 6 participants