LSP and Tree-sitter seem to have the right approach, aiming to provide a standard layer that can support a wide variety of languages and ecosystems throughout. Language-agnostic tools can interoperate with this approach too but they only provide very basic features, not really enough to compare well with existing workflows.

Just this morning I upgraded to NeoVim 0.5 and set up TreeSitter and LSP with Lunar. I haven't had much time to play with it today, but it's looking good so far. https://github.com/ChristianChiarulli/LunarVim

LSP seems like a real blessing for editor authors, since "it can't do anything useful with my preferred programming language" has been a big lock-in.

?. This is a back handed compliment? Can you explain?

If you're trying to get people to try your new editor, no matter how awesome the ideas that you're trying, you're going to lose a chunk of your audience if it doesn't support C syntax highlighting, a chunk if it doesn't support Python intellisense, and so on and so forth. You can have the best idea in the world, but people will play with it, and decide that they love it but can't use it for "real work" unless you slog through adding native support for a bunch of languages and runtimes/compiler suites.

That's a huge burden.

Now, if you implement LSP, you get "for free" support for C#, C, Python, Rust, etc etc. People can evaluate your editor on its merits as a text editor, not on whether you had the time and energy to add support for their favourite language.

I guess he means that LSP (at least in theory) enables "simple" editors to offer features which in the past have been the domain of IDEs (code completion etc.), and for editors supporting LSP, the support for a given language will (again in theory) be as good in one editor as in the next one you might want to try out...

I totally agree with you !!! I think using visual studio code gives you everything out of the box like all these extensions just makes things very easier for you.

But learning tools such as vim and learning how to configure those really helps you get out of the comfort zone

I was a regular vscode user but after using vim my workflow really improved

I have nothing against vscode users but sometimes getting out of comfort zone really helps you

The 10 line Makefile doesn't do Smalltalk like development experience, nor is able to single step GPGPU shaders, do live editing of GUIs, graphical visualization of running tasks and threads, provide graphical architecture diagrams, correlate lines of code with the people that edited it and to which tickets the PR were made to.

Those are called tools. They can be separated. Not everything has to be a multi gigabyte monstrosity swiss army knife. You can think microsoft for gas lighting you into that line of thinking.

The problem with separating out tools is that the resulting tools tend not to work very well with each other and suffer as a result. I'll use gdb as an example: using it standalone means I can use whatever text editor I prefer to read the code, but now I'm forced to manually schlep between the debugger and the editor to do debugging: let me figure out what file I need to look at for this current function, and manually open it in the editor. Okay, now let me copy-paste this function name to break on. Oh, here's a value I want to inspect, let me go manually type this in. And constantly back and forth between the editor and the debugger.

Having the tools all work together in one environment is honestly a far superior experience than having each tool live in its own bubble and requiring you to do all the coordination work yourself, with all of the repetition and scope for mistypes in the process.

Tools work best when they are designed to work together.

Anything else is a klundge.

If I have to thank anyone, it is Xerox PARC, TI, Genera, Apple and Borland, long before Microsoft mattered at all.

I thank Microsoft for building tools that make my life easier and my work a delight.

Yours was a very ungrounded commentary.

Yeah, give me generics and a language to pipeline them into anything I want. Full stop. Let Harry Potter and his friends play with magic.

Seems you are agreeing with GP.