Hacker News Reader

This is such an obvious and old idea that it would have killed text as source code by now if it would be an actually *good* idea ;) (IIRC one attempt was an IDE from IBM in the 90s).

View on HN

One reason it hasn’t gotten traction is due to a “herding cats” problem - the breadth of existing languages and SCMs in use is too big to manage. But mostly it’s the business model, who’s going to invest the vast amount of time for this when there is virtually nothing in it for them, it’s a giant onion. There’s little money in tooling, there’s far less in metatooling.

There’s also a bit of “squeaky wheel” resistance. Still a significant minority clinging to text editors as opposed to modern IDEs. But given the demographics here I imagine this segment will begin to shrink dramatically within a decade or so. Shrug.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com