>> The future of tools isn't in a better Eclipse or Visual Studio, it's in easily created domain specific experiences.
How is that goal different from that of the Eclipse platform (http://www.eclipse.org/platform/overview.php) - a common base where people can develop individual add-ons to suit the domain they're working on? Eclipse platform and LT clearly have different interaction models and technologies, but from the leading quote of the article, the same goal.
Writing Java in Eclipse is, as many have said, a great experience (in the continuum of Java-development experience). But you know what else is pretty good? PyDev (http://pydev.org/) - a Python IDE that's written on the Eclipse platform. It uses the same interaction models and designs as Eclipse for Java, but it's also got a whole bunch of bits that are just targeted at Python development. There's also a tool (the name of which I don't recall) that our DBA uses for all his database management that's written on the Eclipse platform.
I'm all for specific - I use PyCharm every day, which does one thing (Python development) really well. But I think calling out Eclipse like the parent article does is wrong. It too can be a platform for "easily created domain specific experiences"; it's just a different one with a different paradigm.
It's not. It's really not. I've heard good things about PyCharm, but the best environment for Python that I have seen so far is Emacs. And Light Table definitely looks like an improvement on that. My only concern with this is the speed. I want this to have the same response time as Emacs or Vim. Then there would be no reason not to use it.
I specifically chose the description "pretty good" (as opposed to "great" or something more flowery) for PyDev, because I think that best summarizes it. It's got a number of issues with it (and it's sometimes as slow as a dog), but for the hobby developer it's more than enough.
Once I started working in Python and spending 30-something hours/week in the environment, its flaws started to overcome its benefits (namely: it was free, and I knew how to use it), and it was time to move to PyCharm...which is also slow, unless you throw a few gigs of RAM at it and at which point it becomes amazing.
How is that goal different from that of the Eclipse platform (http://www.eclipse.org/platform/overview.php) - a common base where people can develop individual add-ons to suit the domain they're working on? Eclipse platform and LT clearly have different interaction models and technologies, but from the leading quote of the article, the same goal.
Writing Java in Eclipse is, as many have said, a great experience (in the continuum of Java-development experience). But you know what else is pretty good? PyDev (http://pydev.org/) - a Python IDE that's written on the Eclipse platform. It uses the same interaction models and designs as Eclipse for Java, but it's also got a whole bunch of bits that are just targeted at Python development. There's also a tool (the name of which I don't recall) that our DBA uses for all his database management that's written on the Eclipse platform.
I'm all for specific - I use PyCharm every day, which does one thing (Python development) really well. But I think calling out Eclipse like the parent article does is wrong. It too can be a platform for "easily created domain specific experiences"; it's just a different one with a different paradigm.