All true and factual statements. It doesn't matter if you judge them dumb or not. > and other stuff that means exactly one thing: "our language doesn't have an

All true and factual statements. It doesn't matter if you judge them dumb or not. > and other stuff that means exactly one thing: "our language doesn't have any other/proper tools, so we pretend our parens matcher is the best thing since sliced cheese" You're operating in the hive mind mentality of us vs them. I'm talking objectively about syntax families and types of editors. You'll probably keep being downvoted as long as you continue that kind of discourse on HN. Given Lisp syntax, a structural editor adds tremendous value. Most users of Lisp syntax languages find it an invaluable tool, and would not trade it in for code refactoring tools or linters. Its okay if you disagree. Depending on the Lisp language you pick, you can also have code refactoring tools and linters if you wish. Or maybe you just don't like the features of Lisp, that's okay too, use PHP. The fact the tool is simple and easy to implement does not change its value add. Think of how awesome the invention of the wheel is, even though its quite primitive. So at this point, its hard for me to understand your disagreement. Idea's PHP editor is not a structural editor. This is not a criticism of PHP, or Idea's editor. Emacs offers structural editing of Lisp code. I personally dislike Emacs. That doesn't change the fact it supports structural editing of Lisp code. If you are curious, for example, given Clojure as the Lisp syntax language, Emacs does offer code refactoring and linting as well as structural editing. You can extract functions, auto-complete imports, rename variables, fold code blocks, have syntax errors highlighted, have certain code errors reported on the fly, jump to definition, see source and documentation, find all usage, auto-complete, snippets, auto-format, continuously run tests, debugging with breakpoints, etc. I personally don't use Emacs though, because I like mouse support and modern GUIs. So for Clojure, I prefer IntelliJ Cursive which has all those features also, and Eclipse CounterClockWise which has most of them, minus refactoring. So I'm just pointing out that even given a Lisp which has all the linting and refactoring features you talk about, how structural editing is still highly valued and one of the best feature of all of those when wanting to code with the Lisp syntax.