Here’s a fun news bit, on the cusp of the upcoming FCS release of NetBeans 6.7:
Just when you thought you’d heard everything about declarative programming on the NetBeans platform… there’s the “rise” of Scheme, as both a dev language supported on NetBeans technology and as an implementation of an alternative NetBeans-based IDE on its own.
LambdaBeans is the IDE in question (at 1.0 RC1 as of this writing), built specifically to support Scheme development in a NetBeans-like development context. Geertjan interviewed the intrepid developer who embarked on creating LambdaBeans; it seems surprising that fans of other languages have not created similar IDEs targeting their languages of choice. After all, NetBeans itself is the prime example of a decently sophisticated application built on the NetBeans Platform. So why not just use as much of the IDE source as possible, remove the extraneous code not applicable for your features, and then focus on adding language-specific highlighting and management? 
Good times, folks… good times. 
N.B.
Want to try LambdaBeans 1.0 RC1? Download it now from the Project Kenai site.
