[nickelpro]

Ya, this is the core of the disagreement that I would run into with the old school lispers.

I see it, I do, my third eye is open. I get the entire flow that the interactive development environment brings to the table and how it is infinitely superior than what existed in every other language for decades.

But I don't like it more than the modern tooling. That's pure personal preference. I don't like this weird stateful thing hanging out in the background of my dev environment. I don't find value in sending random expressions into the weird stateful blob. If I wanted to drop into a debugger, I'll ask, don't hijack my stacktraces.

I write tight test loops, modify my code, run the tests from scratch in the same one-key press the lispers use to evaluate their s-expressions. I don't need to go back and verify my build or application works from scratch, it never breaks, I'm constantly rebuilding.

I would run into situations not infrequently where some post-doc wasn't quite sure how they achieved the state they did in the image, had a bug, but no tests to reproduce the bug or anything else. Maddening. An anti-pattern I never saw accomplished to the same degree with the Python boys (not to say Jupyter Notebooks aren't their own stateful fucking mad house of bad software engineering).

[sevensor]

> Jupyter Notebooks

Well said. My favorite is the notebook that can only get into the state of interest by executing the cells out of order, and skipping the ones with syntax errors. Jupyter is fine for messing around with data, but saving a notebook is a bad idea and sharing one is a terrible idea. The fact that there are software delivery workflows built around Jupyter notebooks is just sheer lunacy.

[anonzzzies]

But that is 'the modern way'... It is what all python people are doing. It is terrible, I agree, however people make out stuff is somehow better now, while making this nightmare. While most CL people moved on a long time ago.

[nickelpro]

We can be more precise, I'm talking about declarative build systems and dependency tracking, project-local builds, tight IDE integration with automatic test suite detection, debug adapters, and language servers.

Those are the kinds of things I'm addressing when I say "modern". I'm not talking about Jupyter Notebooks. Notebooks are as bad or worse than anything I'm whinging about in the CL ecosystem.

[anonzzzies]

I still see those as different things; if there is no 'state' besides running your code as in files as you edit it and it kills the image when you stop, how did you get to :

> how they achieved the state they did in the image

Because in my view, there is no image beyond your debug session.

But yeah, it would be nice to sit together at a meetup and you showing me what's so great about this modern tooling, because the modern tooling is terrible in my opinion. Sure, a debugger is ok-ish, when it works (which is sketchy at best if I see my friends trying to debug nextjs/react in vscode and breakpoints not hitting or in the wrong place etc etc or simply completely not working etc, but let's say it works perfectly); you still cannot just quickly test different path etc. I have been programming for well over 40 years and I did lisp/prolog in uni, then I went to the usual, Java, C#, JS/TS, Python, C/C++, Pascal/Delphi etc before trying lisp (&prolog) again and finding the modern tooling fairly lacking and annoying.

What you do, as you describe it, has simply nothing to do with modern test tools; you could do TDD with tight test loops in 1993 and it was a good way to do things. There is nothing in Coomon Lisp or SLIME preventing you from doing that, so I don't understand the issue here. The way you work is not incompatible with what I say (what I suggest doesn't exist fully, mind you); I work in the same way with Lisp as you suggest. I work like that in other languages too; I literally need 0 modern tooling for that. With 'modern' virtually worthless stacktraces, my tests are much faster at finding issues than a debugger.

Anyway; I think we are not far removed, just for some reason you keep hanging in that image based thing while I didn't suggest that, at least not in any traditional sense. And you don't have to use it; it seems it needs to be clearer that there is choice and traditional image based execution is considered bad practice; that's fine and a good plan.

[nickelpro]

I don't think I would have minded working with you and your workflow!

There's nothing bad about CL interactive development when used responsibly (and this extends to CL generally, nothing wrong with macros when used responsibly). It enables some behaviors that are still totally unavailable in other language environments. The REPL is remains unique to lisp and its descendants.

The problem is it allows irresponsible users the ability to create scenarios that are nightmarish for the technical experts tasked to support them. I've come to realize I care a lot more about it being hard to do bad things than enabling occasional convenience for advanced users.

And for me personally, I've never cared for or used the features of the REPL that are unique to it so I never miss them. My workflow, my editor, UI, keybindings, test reporting, all of it, for C++, Lisp, Python, JS, Fortran, etc, is mostly identical across the board and I find immense value in that consistency.