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The big problem with libre Lisp is Emacs. I love it to death - most of my time on the computer is spent in Emacs, but a great deal of people absolutely hate it.

by pnathan 14y ago

The big problem with libre Lisp is Emacs. I love it to death - most of my time on the computer is spent in Emacs, but a great deal of people absolutely hate it. One tool that got some love at one point was Cusp, a Lisp plugin for Emacs. Unfortunately, as I note here[1], it's been unloved for some time. [1] http://articulate-lisp.com/env:cusp-setup.html http://articulate-lisp.com/env:cusp-setup.html

pavelludiq 14y ago
You meant Eclipse, obviously. But I'm not sure that is a good platform for a lisp IDE, cusp probably became abandonware for a reason. Perhaps something half usable can be done with sublime?
- pnathan 14y ago
  Yes, Eclipse. You know, Sublime Text integration might be possible. But Eclipse is, as near as I can tell, the canonical mainstream GUI IDE. I think getting Swank(SLIME) integrated into a mainstream IDE would add to Common Lisp's usability for the non-command-line crowd by leaps and bounds. I see the computing world as fundamentally bimodal: people trend hard towards GUIs and mice or they trend hard towards CLIs and keyboards. Common Lisp's development environment is built by and for the second crowd. You might call them... hackers. :-) But I would dearly love to see the non-hacker computing world walk in the wonders of Lisp. I've attempted to teach several people Lisp, and the development environment is, hands down, the major stumbling point (after the parentheses whining is finished with). This is a major barrier to getting people onboarded. I suppose that means I should try to get Cusp/lispdev compiling this weekend and see what state its in. :-) Other barriers include no modern GUI library[1]; no popular webapp framework[2], no single point of contact for the language, and a lack of a flagship thing to raise the flag around (Ruby/Rails, Python/NumPy|Django, Clojure/not-java, etc). [1] The libraries that exist are fairly thin bindings over QT, SDL, and TK. They are far behind the sleek usability of, say, Clojure's seesaw or the even clunkiness of C# autogenerated code. [2] Clack and children are getting there
brudgers 14y ago
The problem with SLIME: A programmer wants to learn Lisp, now he has two things to learn. Lisp and Emacs. That's what is good about LispIDE. It's very lightweight (and being lightweight is also a disadvantage). I no longer feel lost in Emacs. I was able to anchor it to my background with AutoCad - and there are huge architectural similarities between Emacs and pre-Windows versions of AutoCad. Both have a command driven interface. The difficulty with the Emacs tutorial is that it is written around social mores. Thus it teaches the shortcuts which distinguish emacs community insiders from outsiders [1]. Yes, no sane experienced Emacs user will type: M-x next-line But it turns: C-n from cryptic into mnemonic. [1] http://learncodethehardway.org/blog/AUG_19_2012.html http://learncodethehardway.org/blog/AUG_19_2012.html

by pnathan 14y ago

pavelludiq 14y ago

You meant Eclipse, obviously. But I'm not sure that is a good platform for a lisp IDE, cusp probably became abandonware for a reason. Perhaps something half usable can be done with sublime?

pnathan 14y ago
Yes, Eclipse. You know, Sublime Text integration might be possible. But Eclipse is, as near as I can tell, the canonical mainstream GUI IDE. I think getting Swank(SLIME) integrated into a mainstream IDE would add to Common Lisp's usability for the non-command-line crowd by leaps and bounds. I see the computing world as fundamentally bimodal: people trend hard towards GUIs and mice or they trend hard towards CLIs and keyboards. Common Lisp's development environment is built by and for the second crowd. You might call them... hackers. :-) But I would dearly love to see the non-hacker computing world walk in the wonders of Lisp. I've attempted to teach several people Lisp, and the development environment is, hands down, the major stumbling point (after the parentheses whining is finished with). This is a major barrier to getting people onboarded. I suppose that means I should try to get Cusp/lispdev compiling this weekend and see what state its in. :-) Other barriers include no modern GUI library[1]; no popular webapp framework[2], no single point of contact for the language, and a lack of a flagship thing to raise the flag around (Ruby/Rails, Python/NumPy|Django, Clojure/not-java, etc). [1] The libraries that exist are fairly thin bindings over QT, SDL, and TK. They are far behind the sleek usability of, say, Clojure's seesaw or the even clunkiness of C# autogenerated code. [2] Clack and children are getting there

brudgers 14y ago

The problem with SLIME: A programmer wants to learn Lisp, now he has two things to learn. Lisp and Emacs. That's what is good about LispIDE. It's very lightweight (and being lightweight is also a disadvantage). I no longer feel lost in Emacs. I was able to anchor it to my background with AutoCad - and there are huge architectural similarities between Emacs and pre-Windows versions of AutoCad. Both have a command driven interface. The difficulty with the Emacs tutorial is that it is written around social mores. Thus it teaches the shortcuts which distinguish emacs community insiders from outsiders [1]. Yes, no sane experienced Emacs user will type: M-x next-line But it turns: C-n from cryptic into mnemonic. [1] http://learncodethehardway.org/blog/AUG_19_2012.html http://learncodethehardway.org/blog/AUG_19_2012.html