Sure, but when you're working on a project that uses only a few languages, specialised tools are always going to be much more effective, and you just update the tools as you update your choice of language(s). Jack of all trades is master of none, as the saying goes.

In many ways I'd love the luxury of writing code in just a few languages. The reality is though, at justin.tv, I've needed to write code in (at least) 7 different languages over the past 2.5 years. I would not have liked to learn 7 different IDEs on top of learning new languages. (We don't tend to gratuitously start using new languages - it's just often a requirement as a project gets more ambitious and wants to do more things and reach more targets).

I sympathise with you on the polylingual tendencies. I'm currently working on something for one client that uses several different programming languages plus the usual web-related stuff all on the same project (and with perfectly legitimate reasons, not just because of historical baggage).

Still, I think this raises an interesting question: is it more beneficial to choose exactly the right language for each project in isolation, or to adopt a "good enough" general purpose language that can be learned in more depth by the development team, and used together with comprehensive library support and a strong and familiar IDE?

They're not. Most of your time is still spent editing text. Or if it isn't, you're not getting enough done. Any deficiencies in semantic understanding (that's what your brain is for, remember?) are made up for by the sheer speed a proficient user (and fast typist) can get out of a good editor. And while you only use one environment at a time, you probably use several over your career. I've used the same environment quite effectively across 4 platform changes. Can the IDE people say that?

Eclipse is a step in the right direction in terms of openness and universality. But the editing experience still sucks. And it's harder to extend and customize than it should be.

There may come a day when there's an IDE that a) has a great editing experience b) is fast, flexible, and universal, and c) offer not just crutches and marginal improvements, but radical, order-of-magnitude improvements to the way we interact with software. It's not today. But the linked research project actually has some promise.

> Most of your time is still spent editing text. Or if it isn't, you're not getting enough done.

Are you sure? I would expect that the process of physically typing in the changes you want to make takes only a fairly small amount of time, certainly much less than understanding the code that will be changed or designing the new part.

However, the typing is just mechanical grunt-work that tends to distract from other areas. If it can be automated with good refactoring tools and the like and so minimize the distraction to the developer's thought process then so much the better.