IDEs and languages
Oliver Steele writes:
“Language mavens wax rhapsodic about the power of higher-level programming — first-class functions, staged programming, AOP, MOPs, and reflection. Tool mavens are skilled at the use of integrated build and debug tools, integrated documentation, code completion, refactoring, and code comprehension. […] This means that the more you invest in language features, the more they benefit you, to the exclusion of tool features — and vice versa. And this is what creates the two camps, with two perspectives on the relative merits of language features and tool support.”
Given the existence given the existence of software like the Genera operating system, the various Smalltalk environments, Emacs, Factor, Mathematica, and the PLT Scheme environment, this argument—that good languages in some way preclude good environments—is empirically baseless.
The exact opposite seems to be true—increasing language power leads to increases in environment power. In a sense, it has to be this way: in a powerful environment, the development environment and the runtime environment are the same thing. The real power in good environments is their ability to interact with a program during any stage of its life—from compile-time to runtime. This sort of power can only be accomplished by having the environment and program coexist as different parts of the same whole, and any language lacking this kind of metacircularity has a low upper bound on the maximum power of its environments.