Well... most quants are recruited straight out of engineering schools so you are probably right. About the IDE, honestly once you think about it, it actually achieve many thing at once. I am not sure what they could change to make it better.
Some of the most impressive, most complex Excel apps I've seen were 1000% not built from quants out of engineering schools. That's the beauty of Excel - but _managing_ these apps is the nightmare of my specific profession :)
I'd say two things would make it better:
- Have a "code" version of the cell editor that has formatting/indentation + basic linting. [Sometimes 75% of the challenge is reading the code in linear fashion and figuring out what it does]
- Integrate git-like versioning and some sharing features with Office365. Basically, make it so that you can roll-forward or roll-back on both the code and the contents, and make it so that you are _not_ emailing files around to share them.
