[Jach]

1. What's your own probability estimate that you'll be back to Lisp by, say, 2024?

2. Can you elaborate more on "they are very awkward to work with and only offer a subset of the abilities of the Emacs plugin" for vim? What did you find lacking about either slimv or vlime that you absolutely couldn't stand such that you forced yourself to use emacs? I'm most familiar with slimv and am aware of some quirks (and one bad still-open issue related to errors in threads which is annoying to deal with when it bites) and some limitations, but I'm fortunate to be mostly unbothered by them or in one case so far submitting a patch to fix one annoyance. At least, I'm not bothered to the level of abandoning vim -- I'll probably try the VS Code plugin before trying emacs again, or shell out for a LW license. Specifically it's things I see emacs users do like clicking a printed object's memory address to open the thing in the inspector, or having a slightly less ghetto code stepper. I'd rather have other things I miss from my Java life that as far as I know aren't even in emacs for CL.

3. Did you seek out any downer takes when evaluating Julia? What did you think of any of them? Some specific examples include https://yuri.is/not-julia/ or http://danluu.com/julialang/ where Yuri's post is linked at the bottom as a sort of update. If you read anything like that, have you been concerned? Any good "excuse" articles you found that address any downer points?

Anyway, thanks for your work in Lisp Land, both in code and IRC messages.

[michaelfiano]

1) Julia will be my primary programming language for the foreseeable future. However, I am invested in a large CL project that has been on hiatus for a couple years, that will be starting back up soon. I will however only be working on that during our monthly meetings. I don't see new projects being developed in CL, though.

2) The Vim plugins only support SLIME, not Sly, which offers many more features I simply can't live without, such as stickers. Additionally, indentation in Vim cannot be made dynamic. That is, for every macro you write, you are forced to edit a flat file that describes the proper indentation rules. I have a couple thousand lines of my Vim configuration dedicated to working in CL, and it still isn't good enough, compared to the experience in Emacs. And yes, there are countless bugs that don't exist in Emacs/Sly.

3) Yes, I read that post and some others. Bugs like the AbstractArray usage are programmer errors, nothing to do with the language. Julia is 1-indexed by default, but with libraries such as OffsetArrays.jl and CircularArrays.jl an AbstractArray can be indexed at 0. I shrugged most of this post off, because I don't see them as correctness bugs in the language proper. As for the TTFX (time to first plot/execution) as noted in the other article, that is a problem that is actively being worked on currently by Tim Holy, and it's not really an issue if you build your own image anyway, only when you are compiling the code each time you start up your fresh image.