I generally disagree with the author: good IDEs (and, by good, I mean IntelliJ) are a huge productivity win, and are the principle justification for static typi

I generally disagree with the author: good IDEs (and, by good, I mean IntelliJ) are a huge productivity win, and are the principle justification for static typing in a language. However I think that the author is absolutely right about two points: * IDEs should integrated more tightly with the environment they are in, like VIM. The One-Tool-To-Rule-Them-All thinking ends up handicapping IDEs: something that would be simple to do via some other tool becomes a copy-paste-exec-copy-paste exercise in frustration. * IDEs are generally too heavyweight. IntelliJ, the best IDE in the history of all possible universes, grinds like hell opening up a significant project the first time, building up the caches that allow its refactoring and lightening fast find-usages to work. And it demands a project file/project dir. It's bad enough that I end up using TextMate (which I hate) simply because it gives me a browsable tree on the side and decent syntax highlighting whenever I just want to look around in a project. I think there is a middle ground here: an IDE that is designed with an 80/20 mindset: no caches, no project files, no state, instant open. Offer code completion (which shouldn't require a disk cache, just a parse), jump to definition (same) and then offer a find-usages that is really a grep-then-parse. Not as fast as IntelliJ, but still better than just a grep. And, addressing the first point above, very tight integration with the command line. I think that's going to be my 40's project.