Cloud IDEs are a "simple, obvious, and wrong" answer to this well-known and widely felt problem. By this point, it's not an untested path; the benefits have ei

Cloud IDEs are a "simple, obvious, and wrong" answer to this well-known and widely felt problem. By this point, it's not an untested path; the benefits have either failed to materialize or are outweighed by the downsides. Fortunately, the downsides can be ameliorated, and it's a pretty simple change: If you're comfortable with the idea of people doing cloud-backed development through their Web browser, then go ahead and write your toolchain against ubiquitous browser APIs, but just take out the "cloud" part—the tools should still run on the programmer's own machine, just like traditional toolchains. Browsers are quite capable of opening/running .html (or .htm or .xhtml) files that come from the user's disk instead of over HTTP. (Crucially, though, actually following this workflow should itself be optional; target the browser as a reliable baseline, sure—but if you're clever, though, you can write a redistributable program that the browser will dutifully execute so long as it has the right file extension but that also allows you to enjoy the benefits of running it from the terminal if you're happiest doing things that way.)