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This would be amazing with Smalltalk/Pharo or a similar language where the concept of debugging is a first class citizen (I guess it's the same for certain Lisp

• koito17 2y ago
  In the case of Common Lisp, yes. Other lisps (e.g. Clojure) don't really have interactive debugging, value inspection, live disassembly, or anything like the condition system (which allows programmatic access to the debugger and automatically recovering from certain conditions). The compiler, debugger, and runtime are always present. When optimizing Common Lisp code, I found it very useful to add types, refactor structs, recompile functions, then disassemble the functions and see if the compiler generated efficient machine code. This is all natively supported by the runtime. Editor tooling does little more than create a nice-looking UI. Doing this in Clojure is not really possible, since it's hard to guess what HotSpot will do with a given sequence of JVM bytecode.