Code completion tools originally came out of Smalltalk. It's relatively doable if you can attach to a running process that has dynamic access to your code.
So that's "not necessary". It's also not sufficient: Most statically typed languages simply don't have this sort of tooling because it's very hard to write, and advanced type systems make it even harder.
Ditto most statically typed languages.
> The fact that it's hard to write language tools in general doesn't change the fact that it's way harder to write an IDE for a dynamic language than it is for a static one.
It doesn't, but the fact that there's nearly as much variation within statically typed languages in terms of how difficult this is to do as there is between statically and dynamically typed languages does. And this only gets worse as we move to the sort of languages that the static-types-for-correctness people advocate for.
I really don't buy this. Yes different languages present different degrees of difficulty, but the ceiling is much lower for dynamic languages compared to static ones. In dynamic languages, there are absolutely (very common) situations where types cannot be accurately inferred (or inferred at all). If I write
def f(x, a): return x[a]
The reason why not every static language has great tool support is more to do with A) if the compiler was designed with hooks/apis for tools to use (like clang and rust do), and B) if the language has enough popularity for anyone to bother. I'm pretty sure if you take two languages of relatively equal popularity, and compare the dynamic one to the static one, the static one almost always has better IDE/tool support. For instance, lets take Swift vs Ruby (they're next to each other on the Tiobe index). I've yet to see a Ruby IDE that is much of an improvement on a text editor, whereas Swift is pretty young and already has tooling comparable to much more mature languages.
I've never worked with Ruby, but I do work with (and mostly enjoy) Swift. The one thing I really don't like about Swift is that the currently available tooling (both AppCode and Xcode) is extremely primitive compared to what I am used to from Common Lisp and Clojure.
The compiler will errr if x isn't indexable, or if it is but not by the type of a, in terms of your function's names.
For my own Objective-Smalltalk, I added code-completion to both the REPL and a few IDEs fairly trivially.
This pre-supposes that you don't have a test to run the program, because if you do you can just embed an interpreter in it and you have access to everything - tab completion included.
IMO This approach is partly what made IPython notebooks so spectacularly successful, and the future of dynamic language programming will look something like that.
...and mostly is possible because of the many millions of dollars that were thrown into developing it rather than the type system. Quality of tooling has much more to do with the amount of money invested in it than whether the language is statically typed.
But this isn't a post about static vs dynamic typing as I said right at the top. It's a post about the effect of static typing on software quality.