My current understanding of present IDEs is that they are both very language-bound and need a huge amount of work to become truly usable. That means that for any language that doesn’t currently enjoy large industry acceptance, I basically don’t expect to have any sort of modern usable IDE.
I’m not personally hung up on the Emacs thing, but then again my recipe for a development environment is Your Favorite General Purpose Text Editor, printf statements for debugging code, a console to read the printf output, and a read-eval-print-loop for the programming language if has one (Lisp does).
If most of the people who are in position to develop modern development tools for Lisp are in fact happy using Emacs and SLIME, the result is going to be that there won’t be much of a non-Emacs development environment ecosystem for Lisp. And it’s unlikely that there are any unearthed gems that turn out to be outstanding modern Lisp IDEs if IDEs really do require lots and lots of work and a wide user base giving feedback to be truly useful. Though Lisp does have commercial niche companies who are still around and who have had decades of income to develop whatever proprietary tools they are using. I’ve no idea what kind of stuff they have got.
Speaking of the general Lisp experience, you might also want to take a look at Factor. It’s primarily modeled after Forth instead of Lisp, but it basically matches all of Graham’s “What made Lisp different” checklist. The code is data, the metaprogramming machinery is extensive and so on. The idiom is also somewhat more weird than Lisp’s, and the programs are constantly threatening to devolve into a soup of incomprehensible three-letter opcodes, but I found the thing fun to work with. Oh, and the only IDE Factor has is Emacs-based, unless you count the language REPL, I think its ecosystem is small enough that I haven’t missed any significant competitors.
My current understanding of present IDEs is that they are both very language-bound and need a huge amount of work to become truly usable. That means that for any language that doesn’t currently enjoy large industry acceptance, I basically don’t expect to have any sort of modern usable IDE.
I’m not personally hung up on the Emacs thing, but then again my recipe for a development environment is Your Favorite General Purpose Text Editor, printf statements for debugging code, a console to read the printf output, and a read-eval-print-loop for the programming language if has one (Lisp does).
If most of the people who are in position to develop modern development tools for Lisp are in fact happy using Emacs and SLIME, the result is going to be that there won’t be much of a non-Emacs development environment ecosystem for Lisp. And it’s unlikely that there are any unearthed gems that turn out to be outstanding modern Lisp IDEs if IDEs really do require lots and lots of work and a wide user base giving feedback to be truly useful. Though Lisp does have commercial niche companies who are still around and who have had decades of income to develop whatever proprietary tools they are using. I’ve no idea what kind of stuff they have got.
Speaking of the general Lisp experience, you might also want to take a look at Factor. It’s primarily modeled after Forth instead of Lisp, but it basically matches all of Graham’s “What made Lisp different” checklist. The code is data, the metaprogramming machinery is extensive and so on. The idiom is also somewhat more weird than Lisp’s, and the programs are constantly threatening to devolve into a soup of incomprehensible three-letter opcodes, but I found the thing fun to work with. Oh, and the only IDE Factor has is Emacs-based, unless you count the language REPL, I think its ecosystem is small enough that I haven’t missed any significant competitors.