[kagevf]

> any system that relies on information that was typed into a REPL three-months ago and is now only stored in the binary state of that REPL and nowhere else

Implemenations like SBCL can produce executables. Source code is stored in files and can be versioned.

> The only person trying to fix this [is] Fukamachi

There are other ways to get dependencies, such as ultra lisp https://ultralisp.org/ and OCICL https://github.com/ocicl/ocicl.

[nickelpro]

Yes, of course, that's why I brought up Fukamachi's work to point out that things can be better. It is possible to forego the mechanisms of interactive-development that intersect with image-based development, but that requires lispers to change how they've done things for generations. Neither the ecosystem or culture is aligned to it.

Ultralisp + Roswell + qlot produces something resembling a modern development workflow, but it is swimming upstream. ASDF is totally inadequate as a build system, it makes CMake appear terse and elegant by comparison (why on God's green earth is the present working directory not searched for the package I'm trying to build, like every other build system to ever exist?). Documentation and tutorials assume you're pulling things down with quicklisp and evaluating in the REPL. /r/Common_Lisp posters wonder why you would even want to use dependencies at all when you could just use [incomprehensible, brittle, unhygienic macro].

It has become possible, in the last two years or so, to produce sane common lisp workflows that operate somewhat like other modern environments. I very, very rarely encounter that usage in the wild. I would like nothing more than for the Common Lisp infrastructure to produce environments and workflows as obvious, intuitive, and correct as what every undergrad using Python in VSCode has today. I do not think the broader language ecosystem is there yet.

[kagevf]

> why on God's green earth is the present working directory not searched for the package I'm trying to build, like every other build system to ever exist?

What if you want to share packages (aka CL systems) between different CL systems / applications?

[nickelpro]

Do it the same way every language environment not named Common Lisp does?