These very functions are hard to provide for dynamic languages where modules being included may depend on runtime values and so on.

IDEs do not do this kind of stuff well even for statically typed languages. For example, for a method of a base class, the basic “go to function body from a function cal” normally leads to the base class method, even when it is abstract. I do not know a single IDE that would do anything useful, like offer a list of possible overrides.

Thus, IDEs should improve to become a must have for dynamic language developpers.

The competition for a large IDE is not the text editor itself as much as “the text editor combined with Google searching.” I.e. it’s not keystrokes that matter as much as context–if an IDE can offer me greater speed and a more thorough understanding of my own code than a text editor/Google search combination, it should be win handily. NetBeans does this with Java

One thing that might help would be large libraries of easily accessible sample code (i.e. Java Almanac or JavaScript Cookbook-style materials) baked into a product–a few thousand code snippets organized by theme that I could borrow and adapt.

It is the cross platform IDE called Runtime Revolution that I run on Linux (or MAC or Windows if I used them) because I can use the extremely simple runrev Transcript language for mouse and other events, and from each event script launch any other program or foreign script than will return results directly to a runrev variable or field, or pop the results into a file that runrev can use for further processing down the line.

Runtime Revolution builds a runtime with the embedded runtime engine making a program of about 2MB. One only needs one runtime if the primary stack is a menu. All other application stacks can be stand alone or linked and amount to very little space on the hard drive.

It is the only easy to use IDE that I have discovered that can embed UNIX/Linux shell commands, which I find the easiest way of performing complex information processing on the fly. If the commands are written as scripts instead of directly embedding them, there is no need to rebuild the runtime if changes have to be made to the processing.

Runtimes are license free, meaning the creator can charge or give them away for free.

A visit to Runtime Revolution will show the potential user that it will do anything the others do, without the overhead of learning a formal programming language.
In fact Transcript is so cognitive, using it is often called “Programming at the speed of thought”, something only previously possible to non programmers via the various UNIX/Linux shells and their tools.

I’d like to see RedMonk do an article on this IDE for the benefit of ordinary power users.

My guess is that SUN is will spit and bought out by different parties (Oracle might buy its software business and HP its hardware business). I am sure Don is making that deal come through in HP