2 HN users recommended this tutorial2 months2019–2024score 2
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN points to it to show what the Lisp REPL workflow is like and as a good tour of SLIME.
Marco Baringer's tutorial video on SLIME, the Emacs mode for developing Common Lisp. It demonstrates the interactive workflow of working against a live Lisp image.
“This is what the lisp repl is like. There's not much else like it” (HN, 2024)
Not really. With Clojure you don't even have to leave your editor (I use Emacs with the fantastic CIDER package). You can put your cursor over an S-expression, hit two keys, and evaluate and see the results of the S-expression directly within the text buffer. The feedback loop is so quick it's basically instant - even tabbing over to a browser or terminal window feels lethargic in comparison. I haven't used Common Lisp much, but I've seen a few really impressive demos of debugging in its available REPLs. This is a longer one, but a good tour of SLIME (also an Emacs package): [this video]
I'm not saying that I don't understand the appeal; it's just that interactive development is usually done in Jupyter Notebooks due to the shortcomings of various editors not able to do code evaluation. I'm dreaming about something like Emacs Slime[0] for other languages (that aren't Common Lisp) where you can write code, evaluate it in the editor, switch to the REPL and test it, recompile while debugging.... etc. [1] And the most similar tool of the other languages... is basically jupyter-notebook. There is no such tool for interactive development except with the bare-bone REPL in the shell. [0] [link] [1] [this video] , [link] ,
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