I had one of those weird cross-over experiences last night when I came across a small note in a post about the history of Java’s origins. Ray Cromwell is quoted as saying:
I program in a language that I would actually call “JetBrains Java” since I find I must drop into Live Templates often to refactor and reuse code that otherwise can’t be abstracted due to Java’s limited expressiveness.
After getting so used to snippets in Textmate I’ve come to really rely on them. And I never would have really gotten the power of snippets until I saw a few screencasts. Now I can use that same technique to use in IntelliJ IDEA even though I’m sure they’ve had the feature for several years beforehand, I just didn’t really see how it could be so helpful. Apparently Eclipse has a similar template feature as well that we should look into in RAD.