I also think it's a bit overblown to call communication with a locally running process a "distributed system". I mean, that's kind of true, but not really any more true than if you were to call having multiple threads in your process a "distributed system".
It introduces _some_ of the failure modes of a distributed system, like unsynchronized / inconsistent data, but not all, like network failures. I think he does have a point there -- as a user, I should not have to care whether an IDE talks to a library via its API or to a language server via LSP, but here I am, watching WebStorm to act up and complain that the TS language server crashed.
One thing that Blow misses IMHO is to what extent libraries introduce these failure modes _too_: A library can crash as well (and take down the IDE with it), and multiple libraries that deal with the same data can get inconsistent. That's actually a problem of quality control, integrating code from multiple third parties, and so on.
Security, too. If I’m editing a .env file with a bunch of passwords in one buffer, or maybe some sensitive data I copied and pasted into an empty text window I’m using for temporary notes, I don’t necessarily want some random code written by some 3rd party running in the same process space. I mean, most of userland is pretty much written by various random people already, but I might trust a language server to tell me that I forgot a semicolon in a shell script without trusting it with the contents of /etc/shadow.
