To Suggest or Not To Suggest

Ajax has been one of the most hyped technologies in recent memory. However, much of the hype is deserved. It really has changed the way we (web developers) build applications and the expectation of users. One of the archetypes of Ajax is the auto-suggest text box. I don't know who first came up with, but I first remember seeing it on Google. I think it was once a "special" version of the Google home page (Google Suggest?), but not it is standard:

It makes for a natural option on search text boxes. Here it is on some of the other search engines out there. Yahoo:

And on the search hotness, Bing:

Of course pure search engines are hardly the only sites that have search and thus have auto-suggest text boxes. It's pretty useful for ecommerce sites too...

As you can see, some sites have gotten creative with their suggestions. Here is another great example of that from Apple:

All of these examples are for search text boxes. If what you want is not suggested, you can still type it and the application will perform a search on it. A little more interesting example is on Facebook:

Here there is a "closed list" behind the suggest box: your friends. However, it is still a search box. If you type something that is not in the list, it will still perform a search that will return results. Of course, really all of the suggest boxes have a closed list behind them as well, but that list is probably much bigger than your list of friends on Facebook (unless you are Robert Scoble.) So the theme continues: there is a finite set of predetermined suggestions, but if you type in something not in that set, the application can still process your input.
Recently, I saw a different use for auto-suggest boxes: as a drop-in replacement for select/option boxes (a.k.a. drop-down box or combo box). This is fundamentally different than any of the examples above. It would be like the Facebook example, but with the limitation that your friends were the only valid input into the search box. In fact, Facebook has a scenario that is similar to this: tagging people in photos/videos:

However, even in this case, you can type the name of somebody who is not one of your friends. This is valid input. After all, maybe not everybody that you take pictures of has an account on Facebook. My kids are growing up fast, but my five year old son is not yet on Facebook...
I imagine that this pattern -- using auto-suggest box to replace a select/option box -- is used on websites out there. It seems like a reasonable thing to do to avoid a drop-down with a large number of choices, or a drop-down that is expensive to calculate and is often not used. However, it seems awkward, too. What do you do when a user types in something that is not in the box? I like to type, and I'm both reasonably fast at it and make enough spelling mistakes that this could be a common scenario from me.
Now I am no user experience expert. In fact, as a web developer, I would say that I am perhaps the least qualified person when it comes to judging user experience on the web. My knowledge makes me very forgiving of things that might be confusing to others, while it also makes me critical of things that others would not notice. So I am curious about other's people's experiences and opinions. Are there sites out there that use this pattern? Is it useful or awkward?

A Tipping Point for Scala

This past week's BASE meeting was all about IDE support for Scala. You can read my notes, posted to the Scala tools mailing list. I was very surprised by this meeting. Not by the findings, if you will, as I have used all three IDEs at various times in the last few months. What I was surprised by was the feedback from the group, and the logical conclusion of this discussion: Scala is near a tipping point, but IDE support is holding it back.

First off, there was a large turnout for the BASE meeting. I would say it was the second largest BASE meeting, only bested by the June meeting where Martin Odersky spoke. It is funny, because I think our esteemed organizer, Dick Wall, had been intending this topic to be like "well if we have nothing else to talk about it, we'll talk about IDEs." If there had been an alternative topic brought up, I don't think people would have objected. After all, developers and their attitude towards IDEs are contradictory. Most developers I know would tell you that IDE support for a language is very important, but they would also act indifferent about IDEs when it came to them personally. It's like "all of those other developers really need IDEs, but I would be ok without them." We all know our APIs so well, that we don't need code completion, right? And we don't write bugs, so a debugger is of limited use, right? However, I am sure that if the meeting had not been about IDEs, then there would have been less people in attendance.

So why so much interest? Like it or not, but Scala's primary audience right now are Java developers. Yes, I know Scala appeals to some dynamic language folks, and to some functional programming folks, and that its .NET implementation is being updated, but you could sum up all of the Scala developers from those disciplines and it would be dwarfed by the Java contingency. Scala has a lot of appeal on its own merits, but it is always going to be framed against Java. Scala's most (only?) likely path to mass appeal is as "the long term replacement for java."

So when you talk about developers choosing to use Scala, you are really talking about Java developers choosing to use Scala instead of Java. This is not the only use case, but not only is it the most common use case, it is arguably the only use case that matters. Without this use case, Scala will at most be a marginal language, a la Haskell, or OCaml, or Groovy for that matter.

Back to my point... Java developers need great IDEs. This is not because they "need" help from their IDE because of some lack of skill. No, it's because they have had great IDEs for a long time now, and thus it has become a requirement. I remember when I joined Ludi Labs (it was still called Sharefare at the time) several years ago, we had a Java programming quiz. Candidates were given a clean install of Eclipse to use for writing their programs. We could have given them Vi or Emacs and a command line, but that would have been asinine and foolish. IDEs are an integral part of Java development.

I knew all of the above before the BASE meeting, but what I did not know was how many development organizations were at a critical juncture when it comes to Scala. For many folks, Scala, the language, has won the arguments. Whatever perceived extra complexity that it has, has been judged as worth it. Whatever challenges there may be in hiring people to develop in Scala can be mitigated. Legacy code is not even a factor, as integration with existing Java code is trivial. Maybe it's bleak future of Java, or maybe it's the high profile use of Scala at Twitter. Who knows, but Scala is poised to take a big piece of the Java pie.

Thus the missing piece is IDE support. Development orgs can't switch to Scala without IDE support, and the support is not there yet. That's the bad news. The good news is that Scala is ready to explode once the IDE support is there. There are a lot of folks out there ready to adopt Scala simply as a "better Java." They just need an IDE that is on par with Java IDEs. That is the standard.

All of that being said, there is a lot of concern around the IDEs. Many people expressed to me that they are worried that IDE progress is being coupled to the release of Scala 2.8. That seems reasonable at first, but what happens if 2.8 is not released until 2010 sometime? Will Scala lose its momentum and window of opportunity?

The Strange Loop

In October, I am speaking at the inaugural Strange Loop conference in St. Louis. This is not your run of the mill conference. It is organized by Alex Miller, who you might have seen speak the last couple of years at JavaOne. The speaker list is sweet: Alex Payne and Bob Lee are doing the keynotes, with sessions by Charles Nutter, Dean Wampler, Stefan Schmidt, Guillaume Laforge, Jeff Brown, and Alex Buckley. I am doing a talk on iPhone/Android development. It will probably be pretty boring compared to the other sessions. I may try to spice it up with some shameless plugging of Scala+Android balanced by some Fake Steve Jobs quotes about Android.