I know this discussion is getting kind of old, but I thought I'd add my two cents. For years, I've been coding in a Linux environment with EMACS (I know, that's another topic for discussion) which in my dev env had no autocomplete, but had syntax coloring. I started out in school with emacs on a dumb terminal which was awesome in that you had pretty good control of the text (which is what emacs was good at and was created for in the first place). Point being, there was no crutch as far as syntax was concerned because you were tested on that sort of thing in school. So, now, in my professional world it has been a slow migration toward IDEs with all its functionality to allow me to not have to think about how to implement something on a micro level but think about the big picture. I think that when I use languages with a big API, I don't want to have to remember all the methods used in a standard Map or List to get my work done. I know the syntax of the base keywords in many languages and THAT is required because that goes down to basic language functionality. You need to know how to create a for loop and use if-else and switch statements, etc. to even get a start on implementing code in your project. So then I migrated to using Netbeans and eclipse for C++ and it had autocomplete and syntax coloring and could wire in a compiler and debugger. I now develop in C# and use Visual Studio. These tools now allow me to code much quicker and my SLOC counts are much larger because of these because I can think about the big picture and allow the tools to help me implement on a lower level much easier and quicker. Because, after all, quicker means cheaper and that's the name of the game these days. It looks like I added more like $2. Cheers...Steve--