[patrec]

> One other nicety I'd add that you don't get from the Python stacktrace is the ability to inspect each frame to see the local bindings

No, you do get that. Even in the plain python interpreter you can do import pdb; pdb.pm() after an error to do post mortem debugging and walk up and down the stackframes and inspect or manipulate local variables. In ipython that happens automatically (if you run with --pdb) or after you type `debug` after an exception. And tooling for production stacktraces normally also captures local variables.

There are a bunch of additional niceties that Common Lisp has, such as turtles-most-of-the-way-down: you might eventually hit a foreign function call you cannot further inspect, but for most Common Lisp implementations almost everything is implemented in lisp. In python you a significant proportion are C extensions which are opaque to the built in debugger, although you can make gdb work. Also remote debugging is much more natural in common lisp.

Generally the stuff that is better about the debugging experience in python is in a way more superficial and the stuff that's nicer in common lisp is much more fundamental, and yet, my experience is different than yours: the superficial stuff that python does well and common lisp does badly or simply less well matters more for overall productivity for most things I tend to do. This is although the debugger related stuff you can't do as well with common lisp amounts more or less to minor friction whereas the stuff you can't do with python is really hard to work around if you need it.

I think this is an object lesson on focussing on the (right) low hanging fruit.