I'd rather see people try to improve our tools than not. And yes, the academic argument against it is "we're hampered by our languages".
So we are. Nobody proposed not working on new languages. But even if there was an entirely new language that made for fantastic IDEs (cough Smalltalk ;), we have an insanely large existing code base in "legacy" languages.
Until those are ported to those new languages (and I have a few piles of FORTRAN and COBOL code to say "that ain't gonna happen, ever"), any improvement in our tooling is progress.
Yes, we'd all like a silver bullet that makes us 2x more productive. Until we have that, I propose we tackle our problems on all fronts, not just a single one.
(For the record, I'm extremely skeptical about those new IDEs and their success. We'll see what happens. I'll still throw a bit of money at it, just because I think any kind of work on new tooling will result in new insights)
So we are. Nobody proposed not working on new languages. But even if there was an entirely new language that made for fantastic IDEs (cough Smalltalk ;), we have an insanely large existing code base in "legacy" languages.
Until those are ported to those new languages (and I have a few piles of FORTRAN and COBOL code to say "that ain't gonna happen, ever"), any improvement in our tooling is progress.
Yes, we'd all like a silver bullet that makes us 2x more productive. Until we have that, I propose we tackle our problems on all fronts, not just a single one.
(For the record, I'm extremely skeptical about those new IDEs and their success. We'll see what happens. I'll still throw a bit of money at it, just because I think any kind of work on new tooling will result in new insights)