[MagaManGo]

Common lisp.

The tooling makes the language tangible. paredit. eval as you write with SLIME. completion with SLIME. macros. It feels like you are working with something alive and can hold it in your hands, rather than just plain text.

Other langs get 1 or 2 of the nice tools but never all of them. The parenthesis are a chore at first, but after paredit they are an asset, ironically making it easier to write than any other syntax I've found.

Clojure is ok, but just isn't there with tooling. Also it requires project structure. Feels like a loss of freedom against the JVM as a dependency. With Common Lisp you can just open a buffer and get hacking, and outperform the JVM to boot!

[thom]

We have a Clojure codebase and I agree that the JVM places a hard ceiling on some things, and there are big holes in the tooling ecosystem (or at least for Emacs, dunno about the other IDEs).

I wanted to second the comments about paredit though. It's something you have to force yourself to stay with for a few days at least, after which your eyes, brain and hands are all thinking in terms of S-expressions. This'll sound funny, but I honestly think it's one of the tools that has most reduced my stress levels in my whole career. Going back to other languages, you forget just how much syntax and structure you're wading through while trying to keep track of the meaning of your code.