You appear to be advocating a new IDE. Here's why it will not succeed

Correct. Certainly in the software world.

Software for young white males is done to death. And although this article is pure humour it makes an important point.

As if the IDE is going to be fixable on a whim. It's used and thought about by every person who writes software most days, as if there are any magic bullets left to implement.

And if you get put off by a humours article which you don't get the points on, you're doomed to failure anyway.

Go off and try something different. If people can't think of reasons why you shouldn't do it, then there's a chance it's a good idea that might have some lowing hanging fruit on it.

EDIT: To reiterate what leoc posted below, the format this is presented in is a well-used "meme" in the tech world.

It is true that almost all IDEs are doomed to fail and the reasons why are easily listed. But it is also true that the critics of those are giving so little insight that all of their criticisms often boil down to a few things you could put on a checklist.

See, web ides have two fundamental fails that no one has figured out yet.

1) your browser context is not isolated; you have other tabs that kill performance, you have browsers you need to restart periodically (dns cache), or die because of dev javascripty things (eg webgl).

Restarting your ide all day? yeah, no.

2) no access to local files without a stupid plugin.

enough said.

There are some not terrible run-your-own-local web ides, but how is that any better than a fat client?

Its not a wasted chance; its that what you want currently cant exist in a form that isnt worse than the current solution.

http://www.sublimetext.com/

(Note: I personally use vim, so I'm not plugging Sublime based on any bias.)

If you find you've got customizations you don't need, organizing them so that they relate to specific functionality which you can activate / deactivate as needed is a Good Thing.

The advantage of vi/vim or emacs over other alternatives is that you very nearly always have them available. A significant downside of any given IDE is when it's not there for you.

I use nano, gedit, eclipse, slick, sublime, whatever's on the machine I use at the place I work and available in the situation.

I don't think a good IDE holds you back, but if you can learn to live without one then you're probably ahead of the game.

That said, I'm just an old C hacker, so what would I know...

Even NetBeans is faster.