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 co

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.