I would say the downside of this 'rich' environment is that your tools tend to become language dependent. That does not necessarily have to be the case. Just l

I would say the downside of this 'rich' environment is that your tools tend to become language dependent. That does not necessarily have to be the case. Just like you have abstract collections capable of handling values of any type, I don't see why it should be impossible to have a model of versionable, editable code into which you could inject your own implementations for the particular language you're coding in right now. I realized the other day how close persistent collections and tools like Git actually are. And given how most modern languages have programs that are essentially trees or groves, and given that said persistent collections tend to be trees...? Well, what do you think?