Here's an idea: the world doesn't need more ideas, just more people implementing, so throwing out ideas as if they're original and have innate value is unhelpful.
Throwing ideas around is almost always helpful. Often when someone points out a solution to a problem or presents a good idea for something new, someone else, who hadn't thought of it themselves, will be inspired and go do the implementation. What's wrong with that?
I think your point makes sense for throwing out specific ideas to specific problems, but I don't think throwing out a general solution (lacking any concrete implementation) to a general problem is going to make someone who is capable of the implementation suddenly realize they overlooked a giant area.
This article can be boiled down to:
Project idea: better IDEs.
It's in the same vein as comments like:
Business idea: nuclear fusion.
They just aren't productive / valuable.
If say Henry Ford said:
Project idea: Use energy from chambered oil combustion with pistons to convert direction of force into a spinning axis to create an horseless vehicle. (I'm obviously not a car expert)
Then we would be talking about a valuable idea.
My viewpoint is simple: Ideas are not innately valuable, of all the ideas in the world, only a subset of them are valuable. Obviously you don't know what current ideas will be valuable in the future, but I have a heuristic: for an idea to be valuable, it must be a specific (implementation details included (batteries included)) idea.
I agree with the others. I think it's still useful to share, because in order to implement I need to build an entire IDE just to implement my features. That's an awful lot of work to see a feature request implemented.
I do agree that implementers are good though. As I mention in the post, I do have one more idea that I didn't share that I am going to build. I'll comment here again when I'm ready to announce it.
