thezerobitFeb 18
I'm trying out #CommonLisp plugins for various #IDEs and striking out each time. Am I really stuck with Emacs or Lem? I haven't done much lisp in the last 10 years, and I can hardly remember what I used before. I'm not certain, but I think I just used Vim and ran a REPL in a shell and would just run a command from the REPL to reload a file. I think I used Slimv for awhile, too, but I remember it being very buggy. Any Common Lispers out there that use something other than Emacs/Lem?
Show threadsigueFeb 18

@thezerobit I admit I haven't tried the CL LSP implementation...Alive for VS Code I think. Have you tried it?

I would love to see how far a really good implementation of LSP and DAP could go and whether they could get close to SLIME+Emacs in functionality.

From what I've gleaned from the CL chat rooms I don't get the impression that Alive is quite there yet. But there's a lot of Emacs bias so it's hard to know if people are giving Alive a fair shake.

Show threadthezerobitFeb 18
@sigue
I haven't tried that one, yet. I'll give it a shot. I finally got the jetbrains plugin (SLT) running in IntelliJ, the "last compatible version" wasn't compatible, but going back another version (2025-1-7) and it seems to be somewhat working. I don't think any IDE integration is probably going to seen favorably by lispers who have spent decades living in the Emacs cinematic universe.
Show threadsigueFeb 18

@thezerobit It's a shame because I think making a really good LSP+DAP backend for a really popular editor like VS Code could bring more people to Lisp.

(Or...maybe that's the point...to keep Lisp away from the masses.  )

Anyway, my cynicism aside, I'd be curious to hear how well Alive works out for you.

Show threadthezerobitFeb 18

@sigue

I don't know if this is a hot take, but telling people to use Emacs has probably driven more people away from the language than anything else. It is an utterly absurd barrier to entry. Emacs is just not for some people (most people, actually, according to a poll I ran recently), and if those people can't be given a good dev environment, they will move along pretty quick. I know some people see this as a good thing, and I despise those people with all my heart.

Show threadthezerobitFeb 18
@sigue
I installed the Alive plugin in VSCodium, and the instructions say to open a Lisp file and run the "Alive: Start REPL And Attach" command. There are indeed several "Alive: ..." commands available, but none that say Start REPL or anything close to that 🤷 . This matches, roughly, my experience with every other IDE I have tried.
Show threadsigue

@thezerobit

I work on LSP for #DylanLang sometimes. If I ever give up on Dylan maybe I'll work on similar things for CL and try to make them usable.

Feb 18 at 4:00amWeb
Show threadthezerobitFeb 18
@sigue
I got SLT plugin for IntelliJ working by installing an older version even than the one that is supposed to be compatible. On one project, it just pops up debugger errors constantly that have no context. I got it kind of working on an empty project, but then it froze the entire IDE after I made a couple defuns. I'm probably going to have a go at Lem. It's a good thing Common Lisp is such a great language, I wouldn't put up with this level of abuse for most programming languages.