The author really is understating the power of things we already have, Visual Studio and Emacs in particular (and I suppose he would clump Vim in as well). While they aren't the holy grail of syntax checkers, they are still extremely well tuned tools for creating software.
Agreed. I'll throw in my vote for Emacs; you can get very far with autocompletion (M-/) and tags. Autocompletion will complete the word you are typing with other words from all your open buffers, and it works 95% of the time. Tags allow you to jump to definitions easily.
The way Emacs implements these are so dumb but in reality they work great, and it's all really fast. The problem with large IDEs is they can be really slow if they are having to constantly analyze large codebases.
