| > 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 There, a book like "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, Case Studies in Common Lisp" by Peter Norvig is outdated.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 |