| ▲ | vindarel 2 hours ago | |
JetBrains IDE plugin for Common Lisp: https://github.com/Enerccio/SLT (I'm sure you saw it before and I don't know how polish it is, and I'm pretty sure it has less features than Emacs&SLIME, yet, but I must link it for reference. Because yes, before 2023 we could complain there were no JetBrains IDE plugin for Common Lisp, since 2023, we have one.) | ||
| ▲ | reikonomusha 2 hours ago | parent [-] | |
I mean the following with all due respect—and I have a lot of respect for your many efforts and contributions—but it will sound a little blunt, especially as a written comment. "We have one," no, this is a consistent problem with people who evangelize Lisp. We have had "IDEs" for decades. Most of them, except the couple commercially supported ones, were "experimental", "incomplete", "buggy", etc. This includes the one you link here. Are these projects valuable as a starting point for other hackers to join in and help? Sure, maybe. Are they helpful for a new programmer? Almost always the answer has been "no". I have first-hand experience subjecting a programmer to one of these tools, and I myself getting incredibly frustrated at how broken it is. Imagine somebody completely new. You in particular love to advertise these different projects as a form of Lisp evangelism. Advertising the projects is great—I hope they attract helpers—but I think your language around them is deceiving. > Because yes, before 2023 we could complain there were no JetBrains IDE plugin for Common Lisp, since 2023, we have one. "We have one" in the absolutely most rudimentary interpretation of that phrase. What we don't have is a working JetBrains Common Lisp IDE suitable for production use. In order to try to promote a realistic view as to why Lisp doesn't attract more programmers in 2026, I myself will continue to point out Lisp's highly substandard tooling offering until there's an actual product that works. Any Joe can spend a weekend making a 1/2 baked, proof of concept IDE. Even more so now with all the AI vibecoding tools we have at our disposal. It takes much more to make something that checks all the boxes. | ||