On this topic, I want to share the following very insightful article:
http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=680
The comments offer a lot of value too.
Clearly, a simple live editor is not the be all end all goal, it's just a start.
It was very reassuring for me to see a lot of people having similar thoughts about the need to abolish our reliance on files as a tool to organize code. We work with higher level concepts like classes, functions, etc. and I hate being thrown out of the current IDE
Another common thought was that the Language by itself is not everything, neither is the IDE on its own. What we should really be focusing is the combination of the two, as that's what the end user (the programmer) uses. So there should be less "programming language designers" and more "programming experience designers".
There is also some work to find a better replacement for storing source code as a sequence of plain characters in a text file. For instance, see The Larch Environment video.
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Finally, another common thought was that in order for a newer and better system to gain traction, it should offer a smooth conversion path from the existing text/file-based source and tools to the new system, rather than offering a completely stand-alone experience. At least, that's one way to go about it. You'd have to be very daring to try and do everything from scratch; the value offered would have to overweight so much resistance.
