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Mine, an IDE for Coalton and Common Lisp

coalton-lang.github.io

51–58 of 58 posts

Re: Mine, an IDE for Coalton and Common Lisp

#51
post #46
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. It is a potential first step on the way from non-programmer to programmer. 2. "Easy enough for a non-programmer" may also say something about how easy it is for a programmer.

I think the number of non-programmers who think 'I want to learn to program; I'll start with common lisp but emacs is too difficult!' is so small it is not a group worth considering. It's probably MIT & Stanford undergrads? It's their IDE and they can design it how they want, but that's a weird goal for a CL IDE.

"It should be easy enough for" sets a UX bar, not a target audience. Kind of like the English phrase "X is so easy that even a toddler could do it," regardless of whether such a statement is figurative or literal.

Re: Mine, an IDE for Coalton and Common Lisp

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like SLIME isn't essential to execute Lisp code, you're right, but it is essential in order to understand the efficiencies afforded by interactive development, which may as well be one of the pillars of the language, since "garbage collection" and "an object system" aren't in and of themselves differentiators anymore*. Using something like SLIME also takes a lot of the pains that people have with Lisp away,…

Interactive development is because Common Lisp runntime has the concept of images and systems. Just like you start you OS and do things with it, you start the Lisp runtime and do things with it. It’s a point A to point B type of interaction like running a script. Smalltalk, SMl, a modern web browser,… has the same kind of interaction. It’s not dependent on any editor. Also automatic idiomatic formatting of lisp code…

What you say is entirely true in theory. An editor can have whatever it wants. Anything is possible—but somebody needs to do the work. If your favorite code editor is Zed, chances are nobody wrote proper Lisp indentation in it or any sort of Lisp interaction mode.

Why has it stuck with Emacs and its derivatives? I don't know. It seems interest in investing time to make a good Lisp environment for a non-Emacs editor fizzles out once it gets to the difficult part of productionizing it, which is why Emacs continues to be the #1 no-cost choice.

Re: Mine, an IDE for Coalton and Common Lisp

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interactive development is because Common Lisp runntime has the concept of images and systems. Just like you start you OS and do things with it, you start the Lisp runtime and do things with it. It’s a point A to point B type of interaction like running a script. Smalltalk, SMl, a modern web browser,… has the same kind of interaction. It’s not dependent on any editor. Also automatic idiomatic formatting of lisp code…

What you say is entirely true in theory. An editor can have whatever it wants. Anything is possible—but somebody needs to do the work. If your favorite code editor is Zed, chances are nobody wrote proper Lisp indentation in it or any sort of Lisp interaction mode. Why has it stuck with Emacs and its derivatives? I don't know. It seems interest in investing time to make a good Lisp environment for a non-Emacs editor f…

Emacs has support for all kind of programming languages and other tools. It's very easy to hack somethings and the effort required to polish it enough for a 0.1 release is small. Compared that to creating a plugin for VS Code or IDEA? Not worth it especially with the disjointed interfaces (Emacs has buffers and nothing else).

Re: Mine, an IDE for Coalton and Common Lisp

#54
post #50
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven't seen the Lisp subreddit then, there is a post complaining about having to learn Emacs at least once every week or so.

I personally suspect that the overwhelming majority of those complaining would find a different reason to not learn lisp if the Emacs barrier were removed, but I very much might be wrong.

I wanted to avoid Emacs so I discovered Lem (so now I live in a different Emacs when writing CL), so it's not always this way

Re: Mine, an IDE for Coalton and Common Lisp

#55
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is, Emacs is really slow on Windows. If I can get a reasonably fast Lisp IDE on Windows, I'm all for it.

> Emacs is really slow on Windows Emacs on native Windows has to go through the Win32 API for everything - file I/O, process spawning, subprocesses. Packages that shell out constantly (lsp-mode, magit, etc) will feel sluggish because spawning processes on Windows is genuinely slow compared to Unix. The more shell-heavy your config, the worse it gets. This isn't really Emacs' fault. I really don't understand devs stil…

Mostly to run it in environments where WSL2 is not an option, typically because I cannot or do not want to enable the necessary hypervisor support.

Re: Mine, an IDE for Coalton and Common Lisp

#56
I'm going to download and check out Mine and Coalton. Right now, I use Neovide and Lem interchangeably. However, I am in deep with Shen. I bought a hardcopy of The Book of Shen, 5th Edition, and I still have Peter Kogge's 1991 text, "The Architecture of Symbolic Computers". I suspect the Hindley-Milner type system in Coalton will be more familiar to the Haskellers out there, but it is not as strong as Shen's Sequent calculus type system. In Shen, computation is allowed in side-conditions (if, let, and, etc.), so you can compute over terms inside types. Shen wins for raw expressive power and programmable types. Shen is very portable, but being a DSL, Coalton must integrate nicely with Common Lisp. And you get native exe's. Glad to see a simple way for people to program in CL or Coalton without having to go through the decades I have done with Vim and Emacs. VS Code bores me, but it is practical, even if it seems like junkyard truck with everything bolted on or hanging off of it.

Re: Mine, an IDE for Coalton and Common Lisp

#57

Huh, I wonder why they made their own IDE instead of integrating with Sly/SLIME. Not trying to knock the project, just genuinely curious. Writing a whole editor sounds like a lot of work. I like the choice of Iosevka as a font, though. Edit: One value I do see myself getting from Mine is as an example Coalton project. Last time I tried Coalton I couldn't figure out how to get ASDF to load standalone Coalton files. No…

Everybody has its own preferences. I have tried it out (linux, command line version) and I can report: Mine is really fast and responsive compared to other Lisp IDEs like emacs which appears to be slow like a snail in comparison.

Re: Mine, an IDE for Coalton and Common Lisp

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interactive development is because Common Lisp runntime has the concept of images and systems. Just like you start you OS and do things with it, you start the Lisp runtime and do things with it. It’s a point A to point B type of interaction like running a script. Smalltalk, SMl, a modern web browser,… has the same kind of interaction. It’s not dependent on any editor. Also automatic idiomatic formatting of lisp code…

What you say is entirely true in theory. An editor can have whatever it wants. Anything is possible—but somebody needs to do the work. If your favorite code editor is Zed, chances are nobody wrote proper Lisp indentation in it or any sort of Lisp interaction mode. Why has it stuck with Emacs and its derivatives? I don't know. It seems interest in investing time to make a good Lisp environment for a non-Emacs editor f…

Someone threw out a Zed LSP for Common Lisp with LLMs help: https://github.com/etyurkin/zed-cl It requires heavy compilation of the wasm toolchain so I finally didn't try it. It seems it doesn't have a lisp debugger.
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