[deathanatos]

It's a chicken and egg problem. Input systems could be a lot better, and we wouldn't need (as much) a specialized IDE. E.g., in Linux, I can type « and » if I map the compose key (which I do, but it isn't the default). For really wild characters, OS X has a pretty decent character search dialog (^+⌘+Space) though it has a few usability shortcoming that I really wish Apple would address. (I wish I could get a decent implementation of this in Linux, and I wish I could get a compose key in OS X.)

(I'm not sure I'm convinced that using such symbols in a programming language is a good idea, of course, just that our current input tech is barely trying.)

Also, APL happened.