The problem is that the code is largely undocumented and not easy to follow. People have tried contributing and found that the ramp up was quite steep. You can read the experiences from the author of the Gorilla REPL here https://github.com/JonyEpsilon/gorilla-repl/issues/132 and here https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/light-table-discussi...

I have personally contributed to LightTable but you vastly overestimate the amount of people who can contribute back. This is not a Python/C++ project, it's in ClojureScript, a much less known language.

And just because all of the users are devs doesn't mean they're devs who have time to dedicate to building an IDE while they could use something else like KDevelop, PyCharm, Sublime, vim, or hell even VS.

The kickstarter advertised that it would be open source.