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by viksit 4259 days ago
There's quite a lot of technology that allows you to write lisp/clojure very well in emacs. Some that come to mind,

- Swank/Slime (Lisp inferior modes) that allow you to write lisp, evaluate within the editor, see your results in a buffer. Offer auto complete, refactoring, debugging et al.

The more recent nrepl and cider modes for Clojure build on top of slime/swank and offer extremely great tools to write code as well. If you ever wanted to have the REPL running on the side and have great interop between code in a file and the REPL - these modes are great. Imagine their power when you can connect into a running webserver and debug on the fly from within your editor.

- A lot of original emacs plugins like paredit have now been ported to other platforms like Sublime. Also, emacs itself is written in lisp, which makes it a first class language it supports at its very core.

1 comments

Each lisp varies dramatically in its semantics. Just because emacs is written in e-lisp does not mean it has first class language support for every other lisp. Would you say that vim has first class support for every language with block & statement based languages?
Agree with your high level point. Mine isn't that because it's written in e-lisp, emacs supports every other lisp. The fact that it's written in e-lisp makes it very extensible, and some standard things like C-x C-e to evaluate forms et al, which were originally developed for and are the standard for e-lisp, have been adopted for all other lisp modes as well. The very fact that the editor is written in a lisp makes it expose useful functionality this is useful in other lisp contexts.