Some times I miss being able to do updates in the way you described.
Have you seen Pathex? https://github.com/hissssst/pathex
It may not be what you are looking for. But I think it may improve developer experience in some circumstances.
I'm curious if using a tiny computer such as ODROID-XU3 running Ubuntu and a Widows laptop could work for web development.
The pocket computer needs to be battery powered, able to run virtual machines and have ethernet/wifi. SSH and Cygwin gnome-terminal (for tabs) could be used to connect from the Windows laptop.
I have been using Ubuntu for many years but there are a number of windows audio applications that do not run well under wine or OSX. This setup would allow me to do web development using Vagrant VMs, Photoshop etc and switch to audio work without having to reboot.
I have tried running Ubuntu guest VMs from windows and it's not always ideal for development. There are issues with VMs inside VM that a pocket computer would not have.
>I don't know if there will someday be a language that is as easy to work in as a Python or Ruby for simpler programs but which lets you get (almost) as fast and fine-grained as C as your features stabilize and you start to optimize
Have you looked in to Cython? It seems like it tries to do what you wrote.
"The Cython language is a superset of the Python language that additionally supports calling C functions and declaring C types on variables and class attributes. This allows the compiler to generate very efficient C code from Cython code. The C code is generated once and then compiles with all major C/C++ compilers in CPython 2.4 and later, including Python 3.x. PyPy support is work in progress and is mostly usable in recent developer versions."
The latest Gevent dev uses libev (same as node.js) I'm curious to know how Cython and the new Gevent will perform vs the alternatives.
Here are a couple of applications that can improve the Unity experience.
Superswitcher which is an awesome alt+tab alternative, Unity 2D for performance (no compiz) and gnome-do because It has features unavailable on unity app launcher.
My favorite superswitcher features is that I can change to an opened window by typing its name. Switching windows this way is very fast and has improved my work flow greatly.
http://code.google.com/p/superswitcher/
I have superswitcher set to capslock key since I don't usually use capslock.
I also use and like unity super+NUMBER key launchers.
Have you seen Pathex? https://github.com/hissssst/pathex It may not be what you are looking for. But I think it may improve developer experience in some circumstances.
Let me know what you think.