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Nothing you say is in any way incorrect and I agree with it. However, for me, the experience of writing Lisp is very different from that of writing Ruby, or Per

by User23 3y ago

Nothing you say is in any way incorrect and I agree with it. However, for me, the experience of writing Lisp is very different from that of writing Ruby, or Perl, despite the latter languages having a great many Lispy features. In fact I jokingly call Perl a Lisp-6ish, because of how typeglobs let you mess with the symbol table directly and it has separate namespaces for SCALAR, ARRAY, HASH, CODE (I think that's the subroutine namespace), and a few others if I recall correctly. It's been a bit since I wrote any XS which is pretty much the best way to grok Perl internals. And that difference comes down to interactivity. I totally agree that REPLs are great and can bring a measure of interactivity to other languages. Except I barely ever use the REPL when I'm writing Lisp. I just evaluate the current form directly. Haven't you ever wondered why DEFPARAMETER and DEFVAR both exist? Having both makes no sense in a world where the Common Lisp REPL as equivalent to, say, irb. I'd say that notebooks are where non Lisp languages are coming closest to a kind of Lispy/Smalltalky interactive programming environment. And yes you can do some very very clever things with the JS console in a browser that are in tune with the Lisp way. And that's no surprise since JavaScript was originally a Lisp DSL and that very much shaped its philosophy. Interestingly enough the Lispiest non Lisp dev experience I've professionally had is writing java 8 using Eclipse on the JVM treating the unit test runner as a kind of C-x C-e. It's no wonder Clojure was such a good fit for the JVM.

ravi-delia 3y ago
I think this is mostly an issue of tooling! I admit I often find myself recompiling a full file because SBCL is just so goddamn quick it doesn't make a difference, so perhaps I'm missing something essential. But with tree sitter you could totally write a plugin to, say, run the literal content of a python expression in the REPL. It's just shuffling text around after all. The fact that people haven't done this may indicate, and I stress may, that this is not something that people are missing. I personally can't use anything without vim bindings. I have evil mode in Emacs, vimium while I'm in Firefox, vim bindings in Nyxt, and an aversion to using any program that isn't one of the above. This is not just hipsterism- on 10 occasions while writing this comment I've had to delete a kj or jk as I tried to exit edit mode. That doesn't really mean non-vim bindings are defective, if you catch my drift. No judgement here! But it's a possibility you might consider.

by User23 3y ago

ravi-delia 3y ago

I think this is mostly an issue of tooling! I admit I often find myself recompiling a full file because SBCL is just so goddamn quick it doesn't make a difference, so perhaps I'm missing something essential. But with tree sitter you could totally write a plugin to, say, run the literal content of a python expression in the REPL. It's just shuffling text around after all. The fact that people haven't done this may indicate, and I stress may, that this is not something that people are missing. I personally can't use anything without vim bindings. I have evil mode in Emacs, vimium while I'm in Firefox, vim bindings in Nyxt, and an aversion to using any program that isn't one of the above. This is not just hipsterism- on 10 occasions while writing this comment I've had to delete a kj or jk as I tried to exit edit mode. That doesn't really mean non-vim bindings are defective, if you catch my drift. No judgement here! But it's a possibility you might consider.