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Much of the power of Lisp lies in its homoiconicity, but it also means the syntax is "just a bunch of parens" - a ball of mud is hard to parse. Structured editi

Much of the power of Lisp lies in its homoiconicity, but it also means the syntax is "just a bunch of parens" - a ball of mud is hard to parse. Structured editing negates this by changing the view layer from text to something richer and more specified to the form, but still in the same basic shape as the code, which is harder to do with C-like languages. Most of what's needed is a fully integrated development environment such that the language and editor are created in unison, like many Lisp efforts of old.

kkfx 5y ago
Hum, personally as an Emacs-er and not a developer Lisp for me is just a nice user-programming tool, a way that allow me to insert and run code for many things I need inside notes, running it on click, on a keybind, on file save/open etc that's it's power. With C-like languages I can't do the same, they need compilation, they can't live in a live REPL, even a hello world is many SLoC etc. Unix (CLI) offer shell scripting for small automation, lost it with GUIs, while classical systems (Smalltalk and Lisp based) can perfectly and effectively. If those language for crafting complete OSes are complex and slow I do not care much because the outcome of something like http://augmentingcognition.com/assets/Kay1977.pdf http://augmentingcognition.com/assets/Kay1977.pdf is so powerful that's absolutely worth the effort and seen actual systems that essentially fails to innovate at least since the '80s...