from Hacker News

Interactive Common Lisp Development

by billiob on 11/20/23, 7:27 AM with 45 comments

  • by vindarel on 11/21/23, 9:32 AM

    To really discover what interactive, image-based CL development is about, my pointers:

    - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBBS4FeY7XM (5min) my demo to show how to resume execution of a long running program, from the stack frame right before the bug, after having fixed and recompiled the function, without quitting the debugger hence without stopping the program, thus without restarting everything from zero.

    - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsKx40ab9SY (20min)showing what saving and restoring an image does, differences between SBCL and LispWorks.

    - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aboMZkNDCY developing a 3D graphics software.

    - https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2020-12-18-repl-driven/

    - debugging CL tools: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/debugging.html

    - and no: while we could deploy a ball of mud to production, we can also not and use traditional tools and techniques: build an executable from scratch, restart the app, reload state. But we can do everything in between too (inspect the running app, change it a bit, change it a whole lot (while staying in sync with local source code), use images to speed-up development etc).

  • by dusted on 11/21/23, 12:14 PM

    After getting sbcl up with visual studio code and the alive extension, my mind was totally blown,

    I'm certain that emacs/slime is the true pure way, but for someone who's not wanting to learn emacs, alive is just pretty amazing and magic, and it fits well with what is described in the article. I wish I could do stuff like recompile functions in-place and just retry the call without exiting the process in every language in this way.

  • by xenophonf on 11/21/23, 12:57 PM

    The Alive extension for VS Code looks really awesome. Vindarel posted a tutorial here:

    https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/vscode-alive.html

  • by borissk on 11/21/23, 1:03 PM

    Lisp is amazing. Interesting why Python won the race to become the language of choice for the neural networks wave of AI.

  • by ngcc_hk on 11/21/23, 8:40 AM

    Not sure what this for and what is it to do with interactive part of development. If you are vim people try search for vim and lisp and got there. emacs people obviously no need.