[skrishnamurthi]

Code Bubbles were invented one floor above me (by another team in computer science at Brown University). So, we're not at all unaware of it. And yes, it's great stuff.

But we also had to make a conscious decision about IDEs, and we decided to be IDE agnostic -- IDEs should enhance the language but not be the only means of working with it, because programmers are really attached to their editors, and a language predicated on tearing people away from their editors will stuggle. Also, having been part of DrRacket from version 0.0, I know how long it takes to make one that's any good.

[stcredzero]

Code Bubbles were invented one floor above me (by another team in computer science at Brown University).

I wrote a significant fraction of a Smalltalk class browser.

IDEs should enhance the language but not be the only means of working with it, because programmers are really attached to their editors, and a language predicated on tearing people away from their editors will struggle.

So, basically you made the pragmatic decision. What you say is true, but I suspect this tendency is ultimately holding us back.

[skrishnamurthi]

I've had this argument for twenty years. I had my a-ha moment in grad school when, after I'd put a fair bit of work into a build system and showed it around, my advisor asked me, "What is a file?" And then I was enlightened. So I can play this song back with fairly good fidelity.

If I could get a reliable, efficient, cross-platform, extensible, quickly-ported-to-new-platforms environment that gave me rich editing, I'd grab it. I don't know of such a platform. So we made the "pragmatic" decision, yes. That's because this isn't the problem we're trying to solve.

We are actually trying to innovate in the programming environment space, and have been running with that experiment for the past semester internally at Brown. At some point, after it's been knocked around a bit more, we'll make it public. So we're not avoiding the environment space. But this is not a battle we're seeking to pick in that space.

I wish you luck with it, and hope we can build on the work of people like you.