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Interlisp/Medley has a fully Lisp-based GUI, complete with substantial example apps, and it's all FOSS now. https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/23/medley_inter

Interlisp/Medley has a fully Lisp-based GUI, complete with substantial example apps, and it's all FOSS now. https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/23/medley_interlisp_revival/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/23/medley_interlisp_revi... I'd love to see some kind of shim to run Medley on top of SBCL, rather than its own VM. If you are trying to attract people to your programming language in 2024, I'm afraid that Emacs is not tempting bait, no matter how good the integration. It appeals to very niche tastes.

vindarel 3y ago
Why mention Emacs here? I'm sure you know CL works fine with Vim and other editors like Jupyter notebooks, Atom/Pulsar (very good support), VSCode (still in development), etc. https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.html https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht...
- lproven 3y ago
  1. Because any time I've seen a newbie ask about Common Lisp dev tools, they're told it's worth the time to learn Emacs and that Emacs with Slime is amazing. 2. I've been trying to learn Emacs on and off for about 25 years and I personally think it's horrible beyond belief. Vim is just as bad, but at least as someone who's been using vi for closer to 35 years now, I know how to open something, change a few characters and save it. I'm not a programmer. I don't use code editors from choice. But I have done in the past and I have opinions about them. It looks to me like you have a choice: a nice modern editor with poor integration, or a horrible crufty old editor which doesn't even know what the Alt key or windows are called but which has great integration. IMHO, as expressed on HN before, Lisp ought to have a slick GUI system for newbies approaching it. The commercial ones do. For FOSS, the code is out there. It's a done thing, many decades ago. It just needs modernising. https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/81798.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/81798.html
  - lispm 3y ago
    It's hard to believe that you should not be able to open a file, edit and save it with GNU Emacs. I have a Mac, downloaded https://emacsformacosx.com https://emacsformacosx.com , started it, command-o opens a file dialog, typed characters, command-s saved the file. > For FOSS, the code is out there. It's a done thing, many decades ago. It just needs modernising. That one is an ancient code base dating back to the 60s, written in a Lisp dialect roughly ten people in the world can program with some competence (I can't, can you?). It's a nice project, but it is far far away from what GNU Emacs provides. GNU Emacs has many many thousand man years more work and polishing in it, ongoing. If you would learn a complex and large Lisp like Interlisp or Common Lisp, then one would better use a development environment for it. I doubt Medley is easier to use&learn than something like GNU Emacs + Slime + SBCL. For Common Lisp, Medley is the worse development environment, since very few code has developed for and with it. People use other tools to write Lisp code (vim, GNU Emacs, ...). People are just trying to get Medley to somewhat support the state of Common Lisp from 34 years ago (CLtL2). It has, like, zero support for Scheme or other programming languages (Python, Java, JavaScript, C++, Rust, ...). GNU Emacs is not my favorite Lisp IDE, but it's by far the most practical solution for average developers: it does not cost anything, it has good Lisp support for several Lisp dialects and all kinds of other programming languages, it runs good enough on almost all current operating systems, hopefully respects my data privacy, ... Sure one can use a new editor with less support for Lisp. I've also known Lisp developers using vi in a terminal. People have different preferences for their tools.
    - lproven 3y ago
      > It's hard to believe that you should not be able to open a file, edit and save it with GNU Emacs. Believe it, baby. See my response immediately above. Or maybe immediately below, depending on HN. P.S. A macOS version is cheating. That I can use... but it's not the standard Emacs UI.
      - _19qg 3y ago
        > A macOS version is cheating. That I can use... but it's not the standard Emacs UI. There is no such thing as a single standard UI. In addition to the terminal version, GNU Emacs was ported to window systems loooooooong time ago. It's perfectly normal to use them. I use the GTK version of GNU Emacs on Linux.

vindarel 3y ago

Why mention Emacs here? I'm sure you know CL works fine with Vim and other editors like Jupyter notebooks, Atom/Pulsar (very good support), VSCode (still in development), etc. https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.html https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht...

lproven 3y ago
1. Because any time I've seen a newbie ask about Common Lisp dev tools, they're told it's worth the time to learn Emacs and that Emacs with Slime is amazing. 2. I've been trying to learn Emacs on and off for about 25 years and I personally think it's horrible beyond belief. Vim is just as bad, but at least as someone who's been using vi for closer to 35 years now, I know how to open something, change a few characters and save it. I'm not a programmer. I don't use code editors from choice. But I have done in the past and I have opinions about them. It looks to me like you have a choice: a nice modern editor with poor integration, or a horrible crufty old editor which doesn't even know what the Alt key or windows are called but which has great integration. IMHO, as expressed on HN before, Lisp ought to have a slick GUI system for newbies approaching it. The commercial ones do. For FOSS, the code is out there. It's a done thing, many decades ago. It just needs modernising. https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/81798.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/81798.html
- lispm 3y ago
  It's hard to believe that you should not be able to open a file, edit and save it with GNU Emacs. I have a Mac, downloaded https://emacsformacosx.com https://emacsformacosx.com , started it, command-o opens a file dialog, typed characters, command-s saved the file. > For FOSS, the code is out there. It's a done thing, many decades ago. It just needs modernising. That one is an ancient code base dating back to the 60s, written in a Lisp dialect roughly ten people in the world can program with some competence (I can't, can you?). It's a nice project, but it is far far away from what GNU Emacs provides. GNU Emacs has many many thousand man years more work and polishing in it, ongoing. If you would learn a complex and large Lisp like Interlisp or Common Lisp, then one would better use a development environment for it. I doubt Medley is easier to use&learn than something like GNU Emacs + Slime + SBCL. For Common Lisp, Medley is the worse development environment, since very few code has developed for and with it. People use other tools to write Lisp code (vim, GNU Emacs, ...). People are just trying to get Medley to somewhat support the state of Common Lisp from 34 years ago (CLtL2). It has, like, zero support for Scheme or other programming languages (Python, Java, JavaScript, C++, Rust, ...). GNU Emacs is not my favorite Lisp IDE, but it's by far the most practical solution for average developers: it does not cost anything, it has good Lisp support for several Lisp dialects and all kinds of other programming languages, it runs good enough on almost all current operating systems, hopefully respects my data privacy, ... Sure one can use a new editor with less support for Lisp. I've also known Lisp developers using vi in a terminal. People have different preferences for their tools.
  - lproven 3y ago
    > It's hard to believe that you should not be able to open a file, edit and save it with GNU Emacs. Believe it, baby. See my response immediately above. Or maybe immediately below, depending on HN. P.S. A macOS version is cheating. That I can use... but it's not the standard Emacs UI.
    - _19qg 3y ago
      > A macOS version is cheating. That I can use... but it's not the standard Emacs UI. There is no such thing as a single standard UI. In addition to the terminal version, GNU Emacs was ported to window systems loooooooong time ago. It's perfectly normal to use them. I use the GTK version of GNU Emacs on Linux.