[behnamoh]

I said this in another thread too, but the problem with Lisp is that it's sorta bundled with Emacs, so if you want to use LISP's powerful REPL you really have no choice other than learning Emacs. Essentially, Lisp is not just a "language"; it's a whole system designed to explore programming ideas. It includes the IDE, the minimal syntax, REPL, compiler, etc. All of this together makes "Lisp" the powerful and enlightening tool that people talk about.

I think the other "inconveniences" of Lisp could be more tolerable for beginners if learning the language didn't require learning a new IDE (or OS, depending on how you define Emacs!). But at that point you'd have to forego a major benefit of using Lisp (its REPL); you'd be back to writing "dead" programs, not image-based "live" ones.

Another problem I've faced with Lisp is lack of good documentation (except for Racket, but then again, Racket doesn't have Common Lisp's powerful REPL). Every website that teaches Lisp is in ugly HTML+CSS-only style, compare that to the more user-friendly websites of other languages.

Then there's the issue of up-to-date learning material. Aside from the fact that there are very few resources to learn Lisp, the ones that are available are too old too. "Practical Common Lisp" (2005), "Common Lisp Recipes" (2015), "ANSI Common Lisp" (1995), etc.

I like the philosophy of (s-exp) but modern lisps have ruined its simplicity for me by introducing additional bracket notations [like this]. It's confusing for me as a beginner to distinguish between (this) and [that], and honestly goes against the whole idea of "code and data look the same" motto.

[gumby]

> I said this in another thread too, but the problem with Lisp is that it's sorta bundled with Emacs, so if you want to use LISP's powerful REPL you really have no choice other than learning Emacs.

You can use Medley which is Interlisp-D, a different, parallel strain of Lisp, a descendent of MACLISP, itself an ur-lisp ancestor of Interlisp, emacs lisp (older than EMACS, which didn’t start out as a lisp program at all), CommonLisp, Multics MACLISP and that even begat Scheme.

Interlisp didn’t even keep its code as text files (though I wrote an eMacs for it at PARC back in the early 80s) so you may find it more accessible.

[vindarel]

Hello, a single counter-example I hope https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht...

(see more from https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl?tab=readme-ov-fil...

https://cl-community-spec.github.io/pages/index.html

and some more)

[egnehots]

What about clojure? IntelliJ & VS Code are also popular IDEs for it. It also support datastructure literals vec [1 2 3], map {:a 1 :b 2} which are mostly considered as helpful for beginners since it's closer to what they are used to in other languages.

[jabradoodle]

While I use emacs and I'm not too familiar with other editors I'd question how true this is today, clojure in particular is often written with vscode, intelij and vim, all seem to have good repl support.

[wglb]

Well Paul Graham and team built ViaWeb with VI and it worked very nicely.

[lispm]

> Lisp is that it's sorta bundled with Emacs ... Essentially, Lisp is not just a "language" ... All of this together makes "Lisp" the powerful and enlightening tool that people talk about

Here we have a conflict: Lisp survives, because it is different and ground breaking. Like Bach, Shakespeare, Einstein, ... But it is also old. If you study Bach, you'll find that he composed for instruments which are out of fashion, like the Harpsichord. When do we last have heard one of his compositions on an original instrument from the time he was living? His music has been reused, re-interpreted, but the original impression, live played on historic instruments is rare.

Lisp is also not "modern", it's not fitting into the "fast fashion" world of current software with ever faster hype cycles, where JavaScript creates hundred new variants frameworks every day and your software from a five years ago is no longer supported. Like our phone doesn't get any software updates after five years (if not earlier).

There, a book like "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, Case Studies in Common Lisp" by Peter Norvig is outdated. At the same time it might be a timeless classic.

The tooling for it has been developed and accumulated over decades and can't be reimplemented every other year. It's not powered by Microsoft, a trillion-dollar company, currently fueling the AI hype. Lisp is not in the hype cycle industry.

Using GNU Emacs plus extensions like SLIME or SLY as a dev-environment is just an effect on the low amount of resources and the concentration on a tool, which is itself programmable in Lisp. None of the other IDEs (IntelliJ, Visual Studio, ...) is easily extensible in Lisp.

> not image-based "live" ones.

to have "live programs" doesn't need "images". Image-based development is something different. For example ECL has the usual Lisp tools embedded, but can't create or start images. SBCL can save and load images, but doesn't use it much, beyond being able to deliver applications with it.

The real image-based development tools like Interlisp/Medley (-> https://interlisp.org ), Symbolics Genera, LispWorks ( https://lispworks.com ), etc. few people have ever seen or used. None of those use GNU Emacs as a dev environment.

> learn Lisp, the ones that are available are too old

Lisp is old, too.

The newer versions are no longer Lisp. It is nicely in the web, but it is no longer Lisp, like SICP has shown

https://sourceacademy.org/sicpjs/4.1.1