Yes, MPS and "language workbenches" in general are chasing something similar. Ideas like these are entirely in the details though, and so far I haven't found anything which does it for me. I could easily be missing it, in part because systems like MPS have a high up-front investment, and I have regretted such investments more often than not.
I don't think an IDE is the answer to the problem.
I think making Scala more correct and more modular is the answer.
Hygienic macros and syntactic extensions are more what I had in mind. Rust seems to be a solid contender here but it's much more of a systems language.
That guy is a maniac. Much of the stuff that he was ranting off about are textbook examples of why functional programming and imperative programming ought to be separated from each other
It turns into a rant about how he'd wish the compiler and the editor and the source control should be all talking with one another.
It's funny, because there's actually a language just like that: Smalltalk. The development environment is the same as the runtime environment, it has its own source control (Monticello), its own editor and a very regular language.
1) Paul is not ignorant of the existence of Smalltalk
2) Smalltalk is not a replacement for the fruits of modern language research. In fact, the academic work around Smalltalk is nothing more than unsupported opinion, and it's not even remotely useful as a source of research.
Parent was out of line but there is still plenty of modern academic research occurring around Smalltalk. Not to mention Gilad's Newspeak (which may or may not be academic, you'd have to ask him).
1) Posits new conjectures
2) Proves those conjectures
3) Those conjectures can be used to formulate new conjectures that conform to items 1-3?
I've read a great deal of smalltalk literature, and I can't recall any papers that would qualify. There's plenty of empirical exploration of ambiguous hypothesis, but nothing that actually provides anyone in the field anything on which they could actually build.
