[xavierlint]

Besides all other points by jhayward, what kind of changes do you have in mind? From my perspective at first sight it isn't necessarily negative that we are doing the things in a pretty simlar way as to how we were doing them 40 years ago.

[geoffeg]

A few things I've been considering for the last few years. These are just brainstorming thoughts, so I definitely haven't thought these ideas through. * Why do editors allow us to write invalid code? Most editors know the syntax of the language, many embed (or connect to) the language runtime. If the editor knows a file is going to be invalid, why allow it to be saved (allow the user to force the save, of course). * Why are editors still showing us entire files instead of functions? I usually edit code by looking at functions and how they relate to other functions. Why not show a function at a time and allow you to bring up multiple functions at a time to edit, regardless of which file it's in?

Light Table (http://lighttable.com/) started down the path of what I was thinking, especially with the continual/inline code evaluation.

Once again, these are primarily just thoughts I've been considering. I haven't found a good outlet for discussing my ideas, everyone I discuss them with seems to respond that "that's the way things are" or "that sounds complicated". I've been considering writing a little editor proof of concept to explore some of these thoughts.