[falcolas]

> If it is so good why ain't it is used more?

Speaking just for myself, it's because most commonly available distributions (such as SLIME) require you to learn a new editor on top of learning a new language.

I think emacs is great, but it's not my editor of choice, and when a language distribution all but requires you to use emacs, it's going to have a hard time gaining traction with me.

This may have changed over the past few years, but it certainly stopped me from learning Lisp some 10 odd years ago.

[wglb]

There is slime for VI. And Paul Graham and team used VI and clisp to build the store software--no IDE.

If you read Coders At Work http://codersatwork.com/ the grown-ups don't use IDEs.

[falcolas]

Ignoring the condescending remark for now, it probably was possible to run lisp without Emacs, but none of the tutorials mentioned how. They all pointed towards Emacs.

If I recall correctly, one tutorial (and several IRC lispers) even stated the following: "How do I use this with vim? Just use Emacs + SLIME, you'll be better off for it."

It's probably changed (at least I certainly hope it has), but it certainly hampered my adoption of lisp.

[klibertp]

It didn't change last time I checked - Emacs is still almost mandatory for almost all tutorials on Lisps (I searched for beginner tutorial for Clojure about half a year ago). I find this attitude stupid too. Emacs is a great editor, not to mention operating system, but I just don't like it and I feel that I have the right to do so. It shouldn't be too costly to list the alternatives and help with getting expected functionality in other environments.

This was never really an issue for me though, because I was lucky enough to start my adventure with Lisps from Racket and it's excelent IDE, DrRacket. I then used it with other Lisps, because I was already familiar with it and adding some keywords (well, names - for indentation purposes) was trivial. I didn't use them (other Lisps) long enough to be seriously irritated by the lack of built-in repl, so obviously YMMV - but I would recommend DrRacket as low-entry-barrier alternative to Emacs for Lisps editor - it handles parentheses rather well :)

[falcolas]

Good information, thank you.

[klibertp]

Well, I work solely with VIM now, but I have worked with Visual C++ 6.0 in the past and later with Zend Studio 5 & 6 version and then with Komodo IDE. I never touched Java, but I briefly came back to Visual Studio when doing some projects in C# and then when learning F#. There's also DrRacket, formerly DrScheme, an IDE for Racket, which I use sometimes and love (I used it instead of Emacs for other Lisps too btw). Ok, to the point: you are wrong.

Take my VIM for example, which I use for Python and (Java|Coffee)Script development (along with Erlang and a few other languages for hobby projects). I have a file list/tree/browser with NERDTree. I have a list of classes and functions in currently opened files with TagBar. I have "go to definition" and "display help/docstring" through Rope, along with four different auto-completion modes (partially built in, enhanced with SuperTab and a few other plugins, including Rope). Similarly I have support for refactoring from it. I have "find in files (quickly)". I have "fuzzy file name matcher" with Command-T. I have three different linters for Python. I have access to git log, blame, status, add and everything else with fugitive and diff is pretty, side-by-side one thanks to vimdiff. I can open remote files easily (this is built in). I have a bar with snippets (with placeholders I can fill in when pasted, of course) with SnipMate. I can open command line (like bash, ipython or coffee) in a window or tab with Conque. I can easily evaluate bits of code thanks to IPython (and thanks to their recent refactor, it's really paying off!). I use zencoding when I have to write HTML structure. And these are just things I use most often.

Now, I use VIM, which, I assume, means to you that I don't use an IDE - but what is the difference between, say, Komodo IDE and my VIM (aside from my vim being able to display in the console) really? It's IDE all the way down to unix shell and all the way up to git integration... And I'm old enough to be called a "grown up". Of course, I assembled my IDE myself from pre-made and some custom components, but it's IDE nonetheless.

The thing is that IDEs are there for a reason. Every single feature I mentioned above is a timesaver to greater or lesser extent. Every one of them increases my productivity in some common situation - and we're talking about Python and back-end (mostly) web-development here, which has much less repetitive, tedious tasks than, say, writing MFC app in C++.

Anyway, if you want to program in Notepad - feel free. Just don't, really don't, try to convince anyone to do the same by saying that notepad is somehow superior to Visual Studio for programming. It isn't. You'll understand this when you have to immediately fix a bug in production code on the server with something like nano, joe or mcedit and you introduce three other errors in trying to do so due to unbalanced parens, messed up indentation and a huge number of other issues that IDEs (yes, VIM included) protect you against. Well, I guess you need to grow up first to get access to that production code, I mean afterwards ;)