Holistic Programming Environments

As a result of the popularity of graphical user interfaces, it is now almost impossible to buy a programming language compiler – instead, one purchases a development environment. Of course, we can scoff at the distinction and say that a development environment is nothing more than a programming language with visual (as opposed to syntactic) sugar. We believe, however, that this view must change if safer and more responsible programming languages are to be created for the next generation of programmer. This paper reports our motivation for wishing to integrate language and environment and makes suggestions as to how this may be achieved