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Ask HN: Best lisp IDE for a newcomer
A friend in high school wants to start learning lisp and is having trouble setting up an IDE. I'm a hardened Emacs user with directories of dotfiles, but I realize my setup has a huge learning curve.
What would you recommend for him? Has anyone tried lispbox?
- exDM69 15y agoI have only quickly dabbled with Racket, but it's Dr.Racket programming environment was pretty nice and it's geared for student/beginner use: http://racket-lang.org/ http://racket-lang.org/ Very nice feature in Racket: it ships with the Lisp subsets used in the book "How to Design Programs". It introduces new language features bit by bit. Using Dr.Racket this can be enforced upon the student in order to avoid/prevent cargo cult programming by using a feature they don't yet understand (perhaps from a piece of code that's copy&pasted from somewhere) in order to solve a problem in the earlier chapters.
- ORioN63 15y agoEmacs... Make him start with with the minimum of customization. Teach him about buffers, a few shortcuts and how slime works. I am a vim user, and I learnt Emacs for the sole purpose of learning CLisp. After that he can choose to hack any text editor into a Lisp optimized one, or stick with Emacs and keep practicing Emacs with it's own dialect of lisp...
- adrusi 15y agoHave him try sublime text 2, it's not specialized for lisp, but there's probably plugins for lisp and it's easily extendable via python if he knows python, so it's fairly decent. I guess it depends on how much he plans to use lisp though. If he plans on using it a lot then learning emacs would be a good investment for him.