I'm inclined to agree with the OP. There is huge power in having a semantic IDE. Many old timers will say that Smalltalk is the most productive language they ev

I'm inclined to agree with the OP. There is huge power in having a semantic IDE. Many old timers will say that Smalltalk is the most productive language they ever developed in, precisely because of the power of its semantic IDE. Just a few things you get cheaply when your IDE is semantic aware: - Complex refactorings with a single keystroke - Context aware code completion - Instant feedback on potential compilation errors/type errors You can sort of hack these things into something not semantic aware, but it's not quite the same thing.