Oh, I'm right there with you on the IDE v editor issue (maybe vim though). My point is that the daily life of a (typical IDE) programmer in 2009 is very differ

Oh, I'm right there with you on the IDE v editor issue (maybe vim though). My point is that the daily life of a (typical IDE) programmer in 2009 is very different than one of an emacs developer of the 60s/70s. I agree there has been a lot of useless reimplementation going on (make works just fine for me thanks). But on the whole I think we tend to think in higher level concepts (regardless of our editor choice). I've also noticed an increasing trend of migrating code to data (though I'm not sure the ones doing it realize this). In the LISP world they are one and the same (as I understand), in most modern programming languages, there's a pretty binary boundary between code and data that people are trying to work around all of the time by "evaling" code or introspection and various other meta-programming techniques. I believe it should be a continuous space. I think LISP supports this better than most languages. I agree there's definitely a back-to-the-future notion here. But I think the back swing is likely to have an alternate UI to it (in additional to the normal S-expression syntax for us die hard give-me-a-text-editor people).