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> I've spent a lot of time with emacs, and slime was what I used when I was exploring Common Lisp: both SBCL and CLISP. Emacs is really powerful and I'm fairly

> I've spent a lot of time with emacs, and slime was what I used when I was exploring Common Lisp: both SBCL and CLISP. Emacs is really powerful and I'm fairly at home with it, but I've come to prefer more graphical IDE's. Judging from the popularity of Eclipse, Visual Studio, NetBeans, etc...I'd say I'm not alone. Telling programmers it's emacs+slime or the highway is not a strength; it discourages everyone who prefers those other environments. LispWorks and Clozure CL are good non-emacs IDEs, and there are several others. I will agree that Emacs and Slime are pushed a little too hard sometimes. > Beyond that, I imagine that many programming projects target specific implementations for various, pragmatic reasons. That has not been my experience actually using Lisp for a number of projects. IME it's far more likely to support specific platforms (Linux, Windows, OSX, ...) than it is to support specific Lisp implementations. Even that is usually only because a required C library doesn't run on Windows or something like that, which is no different than Python, Java, or any other language. No offense, but between your conclusions being incorrect and your phrasing ("I imagine..."), it sounds like you're hypothesizing without much actual experience writing Lisp.

jhbadger 10y ago
Clozure CL's IDE basically is a clone of Emacs/Slime though -- you even send sexps from the Emacs-style editor to the repl via C-x C-e. Not that I mind it myself, but people who don't like Emacs wouldn't like it, I'd imagine.
- lispm 10y ago
  That's slightly backwards. The second Emacs (after TECO) was written in Lisp. On a Lisp Machine. Stallman later went for an Emacs, GNU Emacs, written on top of Lisp VM implemented in C. That one then got support for 'inferior' Lisps, external Lisp processes run from GNU Emacs. Extensive modes were ILISP and ELI. Slime is kind of a reimplementation of ILISP. Clozure CL goes back to Coral Lisp, an early Lisp for the Macintosh, written in the mid 80s. Coral Lisp, and the Coral Common Lisp, and then Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp and then Macintosh Common Lisp all were written mostly in Lisp and had an Emacs-like editor (FRED - FRED Resembles Emacs Deliberately) included plus a bunch of tools: backtrace, inspector, interface designer, Editor-based Listener with REPL, etc. The main difference to GNU Emacs: it was focused on Common Lisp programming, it was implemented all in Common Lisp, it all ran in one application (no external Lisp), much of the tools made use of the GUI toolkit from the mac (menus, dialogs, buttons, copy/paste, AppleEvents, ...). MCL then was dead end, because it was tied to the old Macintosh libraries. OpenMCL was a fork initially thought to run on the spaceship mentioned before (but it was actually LispWorks, which was used for the spaceship). It was stripped down and ported to Unix or something similar. OpenMCL, later renamed to Clozure CL, was brought to the new Mac OS and got a simple IDE, but not based on the MCL code, but using some of its IDEs. So Clozure CL's IDE goes back to the old MCL IDE and to Hemlock (the Emacs-like editor from Spice Lisp / CMUCL). It's not based on remote/external execution, like Slime. Clozure CL's IDE is very simple, offers not many tools, and those tools are not really powerful. For MCL there were much better IDE tools developed. But MCL is gone.

jhbadger 10y ago

Clozure CL's IDE basically is a clone of Emacs/Slime though -- you even send sexps from the Emacs-style editor to the repl via C-x C-e. Not that I mind it myself, but people who don't like Emacs wouldn't like it, I'd imagine.

lispm 10y ago
That's slightly backwards. The second Emacs (after TECO) was written in Lisp. On a Lisp Machine. Stallman later went for an Emacs, GNU Emacs, written on top of Lisp VM implemented in C. That one then got support for 'inferior' Lisps, external Lisp processes run from GNU Emacs. Extensive modes were ILISP and ELI. Slime is kind of a reimplementation of ILISP. Clozure CL goes back to Coral Lisp, an early Lisp for the Macintosh, written in the mid 80s. Coral Lisp, and the Coral Common Lisp, and then Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp and then Macintosh Common Lisp all were written mostly in Lisp and had an Emacs-like editor (FRED - FRED Resembles Emacs Deliberately) included plus a bunch of tools: backtrace, inspector, interface designer, Editor-based Listener with REPL, etc. The main difference to GNU Emacs: it was focused on Common Lisp programming, it was implemented all in Common Lisp, it all ran in one application (no external Lisp), much of the tools made use of the GUI toolkit from the mac (menus, dialogs, buttons, copy/paste, AppleEvents, ...). MCL then was dead end, because it was tied to the old Macintosh libraries. OpenMCL was a fork initially thought to run on the spaceship mentioned before (but it was actually LispWorks, which was used for the spaceship). It was stripped down and ported to Unix or something similar. OpenMCL, later renamed to Clozure CL, was brought to the new Mac OS and got a simple IDE, but not based on the MCL code, but using some of its IDEs. So Clozure CL's IDE goes back to the old MCL IDE and to Hemlock (the Emacs-like editor from Spice Lisp / CMUCL). It's not based on remote/external execution, like Slime. Clozure CL's IDE is very simple, offers not many tools, and those tools are not really powerful. For MCL there were much better IDE tools developed. But MCL is gone.