Today, I am frustrated. I have a fairly good idea of what my “dream development environment” would look like. I am confident that I would be significantly more productive and less stressed if I could use it today to develop applications. However, I’m not sure I’ll ever get to use it.
History is littered with the carcasses of failed software tool companies. There are many great ideas and years of effort lost. The big problem is that you can’t break cleanly from the past. If you build a brilliant new C++ IDE, you’d better be sure that it still works with CVS or other text-based version control systems. Otherwise, no-one is going to start using it. So, that ties you to keeping source code in ascii text files.
If it’s so great, does it need to sell?
If it’s so great, write it youself, use it yourself and clean up – erlang.
Real world concerns – working with existing code, fitting in with cvs, hiring people