I was about to put this down. Although, the C# world requires an IDisposable interface and implies that you're operating on a resource.
Ruby has similar concept when you open a file and pass in a block to operate on the File object.
I'm pretty sure the author is just excited about the language and failed to recognize that this pattern is everywhere in different programming languages.
Why are these big name companies still relying on exactly ONE web host? These companies are centralizing failures to just one cloud host. They definitely need to abstract cloud deployment with something like libcloud and jcloud APIs and make use of multiple cloud deployments on a dime. As for storage, they should have replications set up on other cloud hosts as well.
I was inspired actually by the CR-48. As your JS engines get faster, these sorts of software would be more relevant. I 1st PERSONAL milestone is to develop this very software with itself rather than Textmate :)
I personally hope the likes of SourceKit and Cloud9 IDE and such will someday replace the likes of Textmate and Eclipse. It'll be a dream when you have VCS, documentation, collaboration, IDE / text editor, running environments all be accessible by everything (including your tablets!!)
It looks like both of us are hitting something here. People seem to be VERY enthusiastic about this. I am very excited to have pieced together some amazing technologies.
Joel, I actually saw your app and thought that it was quite amazing looking (it gave me hope in Ace actually!)
I plan to utilize the Dojo's data API as an abstraction layer on top of many different kinds of drivers. I also have thought a bit about what sorts of SERVER side integration this can have - with the potential of websockets, I can see a RESTful git/hg server to be a next logical step!
BTW, I'm the author of this software. So I've been trying to figure out how to save things locally for awhile. I realized that HTML5 has a File System API which in Chrome 9 can FINALLY write to the local SANDBOXED environment. This feature is planned!!