Argh. I feel like I'm skating [skate/SK8 pun accidental] on very thin ice here, because I don't really know a lot about this stuff at the coal face, but...
What I hear a lot from fans of modern, usually interpreted/VM-based/scripting type languages, is that the wealth of libraries and/or foundation classes included are hugely valuable. You know, XKCD 353 etc.
CL has its share, and I'm sure SBCL does, but presenting people with a resolutely Unixy environment – here's a plain text editor, here's a compiler, here are some tools to integrate it, off you go and have fun now... That seems a little unhelpful to me. Especially when that editor is Emacs, although I did not you said VSCode.
Lisp can be, and once was, a whole lot more than that. Now, yes, there is the Lisp Curse to deal with, but now that Interlisp-D is FOSS, finding a way even if it's a quick and dirty way to bring it into the more mainstream FOSS Lisp environment could make it a lot more endearing.
Instead of a text editor and a compiler, you could say:
"Look, here is this complete windowing environment, with rich text formatting, with online help, and code browsers and editors and more. It's all live Lisp code: you can view it and edit it within the environment itself and see the results immediately. We have an Emacs-like editor within the GUI, if that's what you know or prefer, and we also support this whole list of existing editors, but this Smalltalk-like GUI is all at your disposal. All the code is provided and rather than simple example programs, the IDE itself is your example program."
That, to me, sounds like a more inviting proposition than a text-mode REPL and Emacs integration.
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timeasmymeasure
Re: clojure has this stuff, what’s the gap?
Date: 2022-03-29 02:12 pm (UTC)Argh. I feel like I'm skating [skate/SK8 pun accidental] on very thin ice here, because I don't really know a lot about this stuff at the coal face, but...
What I hear a lot from fans of modern, usually interpreted/VM-based/scripting type languages, is that the wealth of libraries and/or foundation classes included are hugely valuable. You know, XKCD 353 etc.
CL has its share, and I'm sure SBCL does, but presenting people with a resolutely Unixy environment – here's a plain text editor, here's a compiler, here are some tools to integrate it, off you go and have fun now... That seems a little unhelpful to me. Especially when that editor is Emacs, although I did not you said VSCode.
Lisp can be, and once was, a whole lot more than that. Now, yes, there is the Lisp Curse to deal with, but now that Interlisp-D is FOSS, finding a way even if it's a quick and dirty way to bring it into the more mainstream FOSS Lisp environment could make it a lot more endearing.
Instead of a text editor and a compiler, you could say:
"Look, here is this complete windowing environment, with rich text formatting, with online help, and code browsers and editors and more. It's all live Lisp code: you can view it and edit it within the environment itself and see the results immediately. We have an Emacs-like editor within the GUI, if that's what you know or prefer, and we also support this whole list of existing editors, but this Smalltalk-like GUI is all at your disposal. All the code is provided and rather than simple example programs, the IDE itself is your example program."
That, to me, sounds like a more inviting proposition than a text-mode REPL and Emacs integration.
No?