Your post was properly moderated as a troll but I'll bite anyway because the OS or the language in use is not selling your soul.
It isn't the programming language, nor the operating system that makes a project interesting. It is the project and the challenge of the project that is interesting. Doesn't matter if the tools required to solve it is C# or PHP, mysql or a real database like PostgreSQL... what matters is the challenge and the problem.
Only a total jackass would think the language or the OS mattered. Only a jackass or a douchebag zealot would pass on a project because it required C# over GCC compiled C. Course, even I have my limits. Unless the project as the most awesome project ever, I would pass on a VB gig almost always.
Nobody but complete jackasses care about Windows vs. Linux. Nobody but idiots care about "free as in freedom". Pick the most interesting problems you can find and solve them. The tools (unless it is VB or Access) are irrelevant.
PS: If you think your OS or your language choice makes you sell your soul, you are an idiot. End of story.
If you are in anything but an anal-retentive religious GPL workplace, using vi (and putting down everybody that uses a *gasp* IDE) just makes you look like an ass. Use the appropriate tools for the job. Most developer jobs are *not* productive if all you use is vi*.
*though I've never used vi unless nano wasn't installed. Seriously, I have better things to do with my life than learn vi.
It isn't that you appear "anti-social" it is just that by eating lunch by yourself, you become forgettable. That is the key, you do not want to be forgotten. If nobody know you, instead of saying "yeah, that g33korama guy kicks ass", they say "who is that g33korama and what the hell do they do!?"... you don't want anybody to say "what the hell do you do!?". It means you get your ass canned on the next round of layoffs.
Bottom line is it isn't about going out to lunch or anything, it is about people knowing what you do and people knowing that you kick ass. In other words, always make sure the right people know you kick ass.
There is no issue. I just think anybody who thinks that the day HTML5 hits YouTube will suddenly stop working on Firefox is kidding themselves. Firefox supports H.264 already--as a Flash plug-in. Why bother transcoding to a new codec for Firefox when the existing one works on Firefox just fine?
"Free as in Freedom" is a talking point given to you by a different kind of overlord.
Besides, I know what "Free as in Freedom" means but I happen to think it is rather impractical. I also disagree with a large part of platform the political party who publishes that talking point promotes.
Firefox users will just get routed to the old flash interface on YouTube. YouTube isn't gonna transcode the whole damn library into some silly format when they can just treat Firefox like a legacy browser and feed it H.264 wrapped up in a.flv. If anything, they wouldn't bother with the whole Video tag at all when Flash worked fine before.
They also have at least a 1/3 of the desktop browser market. That gives them significant leverage in negotiating some kind of deal to license the codec in their browser.
Business is business, time for Mozilla to step up and act like one.
Don't people have to cough up a license fee to implement USB? PCI? AGP? Those are all standards.
People license stuff all the time, even standards. Mozilla needs to get over themselves and provide a way to play standard H.264 videos.
lots of people just won't be interested
I'm assuming you are projecting the fact that most people are purely interested in open source.
You are wrong. Most people want things to just work. Firefox got where they are today because what they produced *worked*. The fact Firefox is open source, free source, or RMS Free as in Freedom(tm) is secondary.
The day Firefox stops *just working* is the day its lunch will be taken by competitors like Chrome, Opera or Safari. If IE9 plays H.264, Chrome plays H2.64, Opera plays H.264, and Safari plays H.264 but Firefox does not play H.264, guess which one doesn't "just work"?
By the way, has any of the Mozilla folk sat down at the table and talked with the folks that own whatever IP needs licensing? Have they, you know, said "dudes, we have 33% of the browser market and our business model isn't structured for this sort of thing". My hunch is they could probably get some kind of deal hammered out. The Mozilla foundation does have some political capital you know--this is a good use of it.
Reading speed is irrelevant because of the bottleneck formed by reading comprehension.
You shouldn't be reading code word for word anyway. Most of a programming language just symbolic (if, for, while) and could be replaced by icons and mean th same thing. The only real words are the variable and function names. As you read the names, it automatically fits them into the overall block of code. The only way your brain can do this preattentive trick is if you provide it visual queues through syntax coloring and indentation. Take out one or both and you are stuck reading word-for-word... Since proportional fonts change the indentation, the meaning of the code is altered and spend more time reading the words instead of the meaning--comprehension slows down, not speeds up.
If you think that proportional fonts helps you read code faster, I'd argue you aren't reading code correctly in the first place. You don't read a book letter by letter, you read it word by word or even sentence by sentence. Likewise, you don't read code word for word, you "read" it visually block by block pulling meaning out of the variable and method names. If you are reading code in your mind literally like "if variable1 equals variable2 then set variable3 to 5", you are doin' it wrong.
Any extra cognitive effort that is required to visually identify the spot in the code you are looking for will make it more cumbersome to understand that code.
Beyond variable, function and class names, there really isn't much meaning found within the words of a block of code. That is why you have syntax coloring--so your brain doesn't have to read and re-read silly things like conditionals, quotes and whatnot. Your brain can instead pre-cognitively parse most of the code for you so all you have to "think" about are the important things like the algorithm being used or the overall structure of data being passed around.
A proportional font speeds up the kind of reading we do when we read a book. When we read a book, we are interested in the words and the sentences they compose Since most of the meaning behind a chunk of code is conveyed by its visual layout and not the words, a proportional font would do no good at all. In fact, since a proportional font distorts the visual layout, it would most likely significantly slow down the reading and comprehension of code.
Code and prose are two different animals. The meaning of a peice of writing is found mainly in the words and sentences it is made of. While the words found within code are very important, a good portion of the meaning is found in the visual structure as well.
When you read prose, you have paragraphs, sentences, phrases. You can take these chunks of writing and "pour" them into a two column newspaper, a leaflet or a book without losing the meaning of the piece. You can also put it in a different font and while it might slightly alter the character of the piece, the words and sentence structure would remain the same.
The same is not true for code. While it is true that the compiler doesn't care about the visual structure, your brain certainly does. For example, you could take a C file and remove all the indents and have it compile just fine, but you'd have a very hard time reading it. Imagine something like the following in a proportional font: var MyVar = SomeList.Where((i)=>(i.Id > 10)).Select((i)=>{
Blah = i.Item,
Thing = i.Name,
Id = i.Id,
});
It would be much harder to read in a proportional font because some of the meaning was found in the spaces. I'd back my argument up more, but I've spilled tea on my keyboard and the cats are knocking things over. Worse, slashdot thinks my examples have too much whitespace in them so screw it. Bottom line is that for coding, the visual layout is as much of a part of the meaning as the text. A proportional font distorts the layout and thus distorts the meaning.
Re:Slashdot losing touch with it's love for tech?
on
Hot Or Not — 3D TV
·
· Score: 1
not alone in your opinion. dunno why this site is becoming so damn full of luddites. you'd think for a tech site it wouldn't bash every new technology.
Late to post this, but I agree. The Luddite factor on Slashdot is really starting to piss me off. Maybe it was always like this and I've just started to notice it--reading my old posts, it appears that way. Maybe it is that the Slashdot audience is getting older...
who knows. but it is very irritating. That whole "Web 2.0 sucks" story the other day just proves the point to me.
Facebook is closed off to anyone without a Facebook account
That is a feature, not a bug. It is one of the things that make it rather successful. I dont want any random jackass viewing my profile.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, information wants to be free and I shouldn't put it on the internet if I dont want all to see it. Well, guess what--I dont want everybody to see it, I only want people I invite to see it. If I can't use the internet for that purpose, what can I use?
Reading carefully the piece they want to comment, is not a question of changing behavior, is a question of respect.
I wont argue this at all, but this is slashdot where you are lucky people even read the article. Everybody is an asshole here and everybody cherry picks from everybody else--including myself.
The problem then becomes, to be very blunt, if this wasn't Slashdot and everybody was respectful then nobody would have responded to you because quite honestly it was almost impossible to follow you. I honestly read your posts twice before attempting to reply--and quite frankly even that alone was more trouble than I really needed to spend. If I wasn't doing laundry right now, I wouldn't have even made it past the first sentance of your initial posts and gave up thinking "waste of time to figure out what the guy meant".
That translates into the real world too. My inbox is full of crap and maybe only 5% is useful and actionable. Given I can't spend the day sorting it--you think I'm even going to bother wasting time parsing stuff that is hard to follow?
How would you like if it was you?
I'd blame it on myself and figure out what I did wrong and how I can change my behavior.
The best advice on this topic comes from a religious text and while I dont usually quote from such things, quite frankly I've never seen this nugget better phrased:
God grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; And wisdom to know the difference.
You can't change how people read your writing. You can get angry at them for never understanding you and consequentially never actioning on your great ideas. Instead of always being angry, you can also realize maybe the fault lies within and it would be more productive to use your energy improving your communication.
How would you like if you were condemned to jail without an investigation?
But you aren't. You are posting a comment on slashdot that most people aren't reading, and those that do misunderstand....Gotta go put more stuff in the wash.
I never said my post and my content is so important everyone else should just drop everything and change their entire behavior for me
It is implicit in your writing and frustration that nobody understands what the hell you are talking about. If "If someone wants to comment on someone else, they should at least pay attention to what that someone else really wrote first" isn't expecting people to change their behavior for you, I don't know what is.
They don't have time to read, but they have time to comment (sometimes very negatively in a non-constructive way)...
Welcome to Slashdot and every web form in existence:-)
PS: Pretty much my entire last comment can apply to coding as well. Well, kinda sorta.
only that they're so used to read things fast and without really paying attention.
You can't expect people to change their reading style just to figure out what the hell your slashdot post means. Basically, you are saying that your post and its content is so important that everybody else must drop everything and change their entire behaviour for you. In fact, not only must they change their bevahour to what *you* think is right, but they are idiots because they haven't already You might not think what I just wrote it true, but your statement implies it.
Good writing is all about being humble and putting yourself in the readers shoes. Your reader is busy and has many other things going on. This is true here on slashdot where this is all done for shits and grins but it is even more true in real life.
Knowledge is power. If you can clearly communicate what you mean, that puts you much further ahead than somebody know knows more than you but cannot communicate well.
And this is relevant to 99.9% of the software out there how?
"Facts" like this are what turn into programmer urban legends that haunt us forever. "Facts" like it is better to manually inline your code rather than let the compiler do it. "Facts" like if you are just copying a string you should do the pointer arithmetic yourself rather then "wasting space" pulling in the standard library for strncpy. "Facts" like with.NET you should always set variables to "null" to save memory. All rumors. All urban legends. All passed around like they are the truth.
When you make statements like yours, make sure to add *huge* guard bars. You comment only applies to a very, very narrow range of programs in the wild. In fact, if you worked on such a system you'd know this applies to you automatically.
In other words, your comment is garbage--write descriptive variable names and don't fucking worry about "saving memory" or "saving disk space" unless you are an complete idiot. If you are working on a system were long variables eat into your 10k of flash memory, then we can talk--though I'd question why you are embedding such detailed debug info in your device in the first place.
As a Perl nerd myself, I'll include Perl too... I'm not talking about variable declaration, I'm talking about the fact that nothing is strongly typed.
It is an inate part of the language that makes it challenging to create intelligent IDE's that know the following snippet doesn't really make much sense:
my $HappyString = "Hi"
Fun($HappyString);
sub Fun {
my $hashRefHere = shift;
printf $$hashRefHere{'key'};
}
Yeah that will compile, but it is really a bug in your code (you passed basically a string to something that wants a hashref). Your IDE will never in a million years be smart enough to figure out that Fun($happyString) is a bug.
Nothing wrong with it, but it is just the nature of the language. Perl (and PHP, javascript, Python, Ruby, etc) dont do that kind of thing. The compiler and the IDE both need to know that the function Fun() wants only a hashref:
my [string] $HappyString = "Happy";
# ERROR: Cannot pass [string] into Fun(), expected [hashref] Fun($HappyString);
A good autocomplete implementation works just like tab completion in a good shell. Type as little of something as you need and hit tab.
Both Visual Studio and Eclipse auto complete seems to almost work as good as a tab completion in bash. A lot of the text editors I use usually have shitty implementations that pop up so soon they really dont even know what I'm trying to type. Honestly, I cannot even explain why the auto-complete in VS just works, nor can I explain why autocomplete in my text editor sucks--my fingers and brain both get along with one and fight the other.
I also wonder if those who abhor auto-complete are also people who are hunt & peck typists. If you are busy looking at the keyboard while you are typing, then any kind of auto-completion would be annoying. You might be typing away and not notice the focus has shifted from the code to some list.
Using autocomplete allows you to get the wrong variable without noticing, and doesn't always get a compile error.
Assuming you are using a strongly typed language (C#, Java, etc) this is not a big deal. Namely because the odds of getting the wrong variable *and* the same type are pretty low.
For example you've got a string "HappyString" and a int, "HappyInt". If you wanted HappyString.Replace("hello", "world"), if it somehow thought you meant "HappyInt.Replace()", the compiler would blow up because int's dont have Replace().
Course, I can't really think of a time my IDE gave me the wrong variable (unless we are talking about case issues--HappyString vs happyString). I'd think if your IDE is always auto-completing with the wrong variable, your IDE probably really sucks and you should find a new one.
If we are talking languages like Perl, PHP, Javascript and whatnot, things are different--obviously.
Slashdot Mirror
Your post was properly moderated as a troll but I'll bite anyway because the OS or the language in use is not selling your soul.
It isn't the programming language, nor the operating system that makes a project interesting. It is the project and the challenge of the project that is interesting. Doesn't matter if the tools required to solve it is C# or PHP, mysql or a real database like PostgreSQL... what matters is the challenge and the problem.
Only a total jackass would think the language or the OS mattered. Only a jackass or a douchebag zealot would pass on a project because it required C# over GCC compiled C. Course, even I have my limits. Unless the project as the most awesome project ever, I would pass on a VB gig almost always.
Nobody but complete jackasses care about Windows vs. Linux. Nobody but idiots care about "free as in freedom". Pick the most interesting problems you can find and solve them. The tools (unless it is VB or Access) are irrelevant.
PS: If you think your OS or your language choice makes you sell your soul, you are an idiot. End of story.
If you are in anything but an anal-retentive religious GPL workplace, using vi (and putting down everybody that uses a *gasp* IDE) just makes you look like an ass. Use the appropriate tools for the job. Most developer jobs are *not* productive if all you use is vi*.
*though I've never used vi unless nano wasn't installed. Seriously, I have better things to do with my life than learn vi.
It isn't that you appear "anti-social" it is just that by eating lunch by yourself, you become forgettable. That is the key, you do not want to be forgotten. If nobody know you, instead of saying "yeah, that g33korama guy kicks ass", they say "who is that g33korama and what the hell do they do!?"... you don't want anybody to say "what the hell do you do!?". It means you get your ass canned on the next round of layoffs.
Bottom line is it isn't about going out to lunch or anything, it is about people knowing what you do and people knowing that you kick ass. In other words, always make sure the right people know you kick ass.
There is no issue. I just think anybody who thinks that the day HTML5 hits YouTube will suddenly stop working on Firefox is kidding themselves. Firefox supports H.264 already--as a Flash plug-in. Why bother transcoding to a new codec for Firefox when the existing one works on Firefox just fine?
"Free as in Freedom" is a talking point given to you by a different kind of overlord.
Besides, I know what "Free as in Freedom" means but I happen to think it is rather impractical. I also disagree with a large part of platform the political party who publishes that talking point promotes.
So basically you feel left out because you want something for free? Again, my *mobile phone* plays H.264. It is the standard. Deal with it.
Firefox users will just get routed to the old flash interface on YouTube. YouTube isn't gonna transcode the whole damn library into some silly format when they can just treat Firefox like a legacy browser and feed it H.264 wrapped up in a .flv. If anything, they wouldn't bother with the whole Video tag at all when Flash worked fine before.
Right, because that makes a ton of sense. My mobile phone can play H.264... whats your excuse?
They also have at least a 1/3 of the desktop browser market. That gives them significant leverage in negotiating some kind of deal to license the codec in their browser.
Business is business, time for Mozilla to step up and act like one.
Don't people have to cough up a license fee to implement USB? PCI? AGP? Those are all standards.
People license stuff all the time, even standards. Mozilla needs to get over themselves and provide a way to play standard H.264 videos.
I'm assuming you are projecting the fact that most people are purely interested in open source.
You are wrong. Most people want things to just work. Firefox got where they are today because what they produced *worked*. The fact Firefox is open source, free source, or RMS Free as in Freedom(tm) is secondary.
The day Firefox stops *just working* is the day its lunch will be taken by competitors like Chrome, Opera or Safari. If IE9 plays H.264, Chrome plays H2.64, Opera plays H.264, and Safari plays H.264 but Firefox does not play H.264, guess which one doesn't "just work"?
By the way, has any of the Mozilla folk sat down at the table and talked with the folks that own whatever IP needs licensing? Have they, you know, said "dudes, we have 33% of the browser market and our business model isn't structured for this sort of thing". My hunch is they could probably get some kind of deal hammered out. The Mozilla foundation does have some political capital you know--this is a good use of it.
I love it. I was even thinking of saying "languages like C/C#/Java/etc" just to ward off your comment :-)
Yup,
You shouldn't be reading code word for word anyway. Most of a programming language just symbolic (if, for, while) and could be replaced by icons and mean th same thing. The only real words are the variable and function names. As you read the names, it automatically fits them into the overall block of code. The only way your brain can do this preattentive trick is if you provide it visual queues through syntax coloring and indentation. Take out one or both and you are stuck reading word-for-word... Since proportional fonts change the indentation, the meaning of the code is altered and spend more time reading the words instead of the meaning--comprehension slows down, not speeds up.
If you think that proportional fonts helps you read code faster, I'd argue you aren't reading code correctly in the first place. You don't read a book letter by letter, you read it word by word or even sentence by sentence. Likewise, you don't read code word for word, you "read" it visually block by block pulling meaning out of the variable and method names. If you are reading code in your mind literally like "if variable1 equals variable2 then set variable3 to 5", you are doin' it wrong.
Beyond variable, function and class names, there really isn't much meaning found within the words of a block of code. That is why you have syntax coloring--so your brain doesn't have to read and re-read silly things like conditionals, quotes and whatnot. Your brain can instead pre-cognitively parse most of the code for you so all you have to "think" about are the important things like the algorithm being used or the overall structure of data being passed around.
A proportional font speeds up the kind of reading we do when we read a book. When we read a book, we are interested in the words and the sentences they compose Since most of the meaning behind a chunk of code is conveyed by its visual layout and not the words, a proportional font would do no good at all. In fact, since a proportional font distorts the visual layout, it would most likely significantly slow down the reading and comprehension of code.
Code and prose are two different animals. The meaning of a peice of writing is found mainly in the words and sentences it is made of. While the words found within code are very important, a good portion of the meaning is found in the visual structure as well.
When you read prose, you have paragraphs, sentences, phrases. You can take these chunks of writing and "pour" them into a two column newspaper, a leaflet or a book without losing the meaning of the piece. You can also put it in a different font and while it might slightly alter the character of the piece, the words and sentence structure would remain the same.
The same is not true for code. While it is true that the compiler doesn't care about the visual structure, your brain certainly does. For example, you could take a C file and remove all the indents and have it compile just fine, but you'd have a very hard time reading it. Imagine something like the following in a proportional font:
.Select((i)=>{
var MyVar = SomeList.Where((i)=>(i.Id > 10))
Blah = i.Item,
Thing = i.Name,
Id = i.Id,
});
It would be much harder to read in a proportional font because some of the meaning was found in the spaces. I'd back my argument up more, but I've spilled tea on my keyboard and the cats are knocking things over. Worse, slashdot thinks my examples have too much whitespace in them so screw it. Bottom line is that for coding, the visual layout is as much of a part of the meaning as the text. A proportional font distorts the layout and thus distorts the meaning.
not alone in your opinion. dunno why this site is becoming so damn full of luddites. you'd think for a tech site it wouldn't bash every new technology.
Late to post this, but I agree. The Luddite factor on Slashdot is really starting to piss me off. Maybe it was always like this and I've just started to notice it--reading my old posts, it appears that way. Maybe it is that the Slashdot audience is getting older...
who knows. but it is very irritating. That whole "Web 2.0 sucks" story the other day just proves the point to me.
That is a feature, not a bug. It is one of the things that make it rather successful. I dont want any random jackass viewing my profile.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, information wants to be free and I shouldn't put it on the internet if I dont want all to see it. Well, guess what--I dont want everybody to see it, I only want people I invite to see it. If I can't use the internet for that purpose, what can I use?
I wont argue this at all, but this is slashdot where you are lucky people even read the article. Everybody is an asshole here and everybody cherry picks from everybody else--including myself.
The problem then becomes, to be very blunt, if this wasn't Slashdot and everybody was respectful then nobody would have responded to you because quite honestly it was almost impossible to follow you. I honestly read your posts twice before attempting to reply--and quite frankly even that alone was more trouble than I really needed to spend. If I wasn't doing laundry right now, I wouldn't have even made it past the first sentance of your initial posts and gave up thinking "waste of time to figure out what the guy meant".
That translates into the real world too. My inbox is full of crap and maybe only 5% is useful and actionable. Given I can't spend the day sorting it--you think I'm even going to bother wasting time parsing stuff that is hard to follow?
I'd blame it on myself and figure out what I did wrong and how I can change my behavior.
The best advice on this topic comes from a religious text and while I dont usually quote from such things, quite frankly I've never seen this nugget better phrased:
You can't change how people read your writing. You can get angry at them for never understanding you and consequentially never actioning on your great ideas. Instead of always being angry, you can also realize maybe the fault lies within and it would be more productive to use your energy improving your communication.
But you aren't. You are posting a comment on slashdot that most people aren't reading, and those that do misunderstand. ...Gotta go put more stuff in the wash.
It is implicit in your writing and frustration that nobody understands what the hell you are talking about. If "If someone wants to comment on someone else, they should at least pay attention to what that someone else really wrote first" isn't expecting people to change their behavior for you, I don't know what is.
Welcome to Slashdot and every web form in existence :-)
PS: Pretty much my entire last comment can apply to coding as well. Well, kinda sorta.
You can't expect people to change their reading style just to figure out what the hell your slashdot post means. Basically, you are saying that your post and its content is so important that everybody else must drop everything and change their entire behaviour for you. In fact, not only must they change their bevahour to what *you* think is right, but they are idiots because they haven't already You might not think what I just wrote it true, but your statement implies it.
Good writing is all about being humble and putting yourself in the readers shoes. Your reader is busy and has many other things going on. This is true here on slashdot where this is all done for shits and grins but it is even more true in real life.
Knowledge is power. If you can clearly communicate what you mean, that puts you much further ahead than somebody know knows more than you but cannot communicate well.
In otherwords, a "fix" in one place might break a dozen other dependencies you didn't know about?
I'm still unclear what you mean.
And this is relevant to 99.9% of the software out there how?
"Facts" like this are what turn into programmer urban legends that haunt us forever. "Facts" like it is better to manually inline your code rather than let the compiler do it. "Facts" like if you are just copying a string you should do the pointer arithmetic yourself rather then "wasting space" pulling in the standard library for strncpy. "Facts" like with .NET you should always set variables to "null" to save memory. All rumors. All urban legends. All passed around like they are the truth.
When you make statements like yours, make sure to add *huge* guard bars. You comment only applies to a very, very narrow range of programs in the wild. In fact, if you worked on such a system you'd know this applies to you automatically.
In other words, your comment is garbage--write descriptive variable names and don't fucking worry about "saving memory" or "saving disk space" unless you are an complete idiot. If you are working on a system were long variables eat into your 10k of flash memory, then we can talk--though I'd question why you are embedding such detailed debug info in your device in the first place.
As a Perl nerd myself, I'll include Perl too... I'm not talking about variable declaration, I'm talking about the fact that nothing is strongly typed.
It is an inate part of the language that makes it challenging to create intelligent IDE's that know the following snippet doesn't really make much sense:
my $HappyString = "Hi"
Fun($HappyString);
sub Fun {
my $hashRefHere = shift;
printf $$hashRefHere{'key'};
}
Yeah that will compile, but it is really a bug in your code (you passed basically a string to something that wants a hashref). Your IDE will never in a million years be smart enough to figure out that Fun($happyString) is a bug.
Nothing wrong with it, but it is just the nature of the language. Perl (and PHP, javascript, Python, Ruby, etc) dont do that kind of thing. The compiler and the IDE both need to know that the function Fun() wants only a hashref:
my [string] $HappyString = "Happy";
# ERROR: Cannot pass [string] into Fun(), expected [hashref]
Fun($HappyString);
sub Fun {
my [hashref] $myHashRef = shift;
}
A good autocomplete implementation works just like tab completion in a good shell. Type as little of something as you need and hit tab.
Both Visual Studio and Eclipse auto complete seems to almost work as good as a tab completion in bash. A lot of the text editors I use usually have shitty implementations that pop up so soon they really dont even know what I'm trying to type. Honestly, I cannot even explain why the auto-complete in VS just works, nor can I explain why autocomplete in my text editor sucks--my fingers and brain both get along with one and fight the other.
I also wonder if those who abhor auto-complete are also people who are hunt & peck typists. If you are busy looking at the keyboard while you are typing, then any kind of auto-completion would be annoying. You might be typing away and not notice the focus has shifted from the code to some list.
Assuming you are using a strongly typed language (C#, Java, etc) this is not a big deal. Namely because the odds of getting the wrong variable *and* the same type are pretty low.
For example you've got a string "HappyString" and a int, "HappyInt". If you wanted HappyString.Replace("hello", "world"), if it somehow thought you meant "HappyInt.Replace()", the compiler would blow up because int's dont have Replace().
Course, I can't really think of a time my IDE gave me the wrong variable (unless we are talking about case issues--HappyString vs happyString). I'd think if your IDE is always auto-completing with the wrong variable, your IDE probably really sucks and you should find a new one.
If we are talking languages like Perl, PHP, Javascript and whatnot, things are different--obviously.