3 ms·
Lisp debuggers are uncommonly powerful, but there's more to "living systems" than debuggers. I suck at using debugging tools, lisp or otherwise, yet I still lov
by 4xel 2mo ago
Lisp debuggers are uncommonly powerful, but there's more to "living systems" than debuggers. I suck at using debugging tools, lisp or otherwise, yet I still love the living system aspect of Lisp or OCaml.
In mainstream languages, the closest thing to the "living system" part of lisp that I personally grasp and love is not debbuggers; it's Jupyter Notebooks, SQL sandboxes in DBMS UIs, and scripting, as in shell scripting. Still, given the choice, I prefer the Emacs+lisp experience over these great tools.
Also, live programming is not something lisp overspecialize in, like could be argued for most of the aforementioned tools. Rather, it incorporates it seamlessly. In visual studio, I can run a program line by line or with breakpoints. In lisp, I can select which s experession(s) I want to compile or execute, while an LLM agent is connected to the same image and doing stuffs in the background.
I do not merely get any single potential benefit of dynamic languages, I get all of them at once, even when working on a source file perfectly suited for punchcard programming (read compile execute).