Hmm, maybe I misunderstood the author’s point slightly, but I find what you suggest the argument was even less convincing. Here’s the history: Every editor has

Hmm, maybe I misunderstood the author’s point slightly, but I find what you suggest the argument was even less convincing. Here’s the history: Every editor has a language abstraction already. And some language analyzers had an “editor abstraction”, perhaps notably Roslyn for C# with its programmable refactoring rules that worked in multiple editors. None of that was new. But that’s still N*M if you do the math, so that graph was never completely filled — for the obvious reason that this would have been practically impossible. No mystery about it.