language-server-protocol

"The Emacs and Vim ... are outclassed by modern IDE" Outclassed in what way? Have you looked at LSP[1] and its support in Emacs[2], for instance? That's not to mention things like SLIME and paredit for Lispy languages, or the integration of the rest of the Emacs ecosystem in to your development environment, the ability to develop and configure all these development tools in Lisp instead of being forced to switch to some other language, etc. [1] - https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol/ [2] - https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode/

I had the sense it was on the tip of your tongue since the way you described it matched to a T, but I decided to flesh it out for folks who hadn't heard of LSPs. :) You're right, at this moment, the LSP is circumscribed in that it doesn't expose the AST (even though it could) which means one is limited to the capabilities it does expose. The claim is that the goal is parity across languages and exposing the ASTs is contrary to this [1]. I'm hoping this philosophy is challenged. In the mean time one might have to rely on languages themselves exposing their ASTs, eg. Python is able to expose its ast (via the ast module). So yes, right now one wouldn't be able to write say an IntelliJ IDEA type IDE based off a language server alone -- one wouldd have to be able to create the AST oneself. [1] https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-proto

It is still missing semantic highlighting (e.g. a local variable has a different color than a function parameter), although looks like things are finally moving on that front. https://github.com/microsoft/language-server-protocol/issues...