well, i agree with the the following words written somewhere on this page by someone else:
" IMO, what matters here is "simplicity" from a usability standpoint, not a functional one. The answer isn't necessarily to deliver a crippled IDE to the user, but to make the things a beginner needs to do as easy to do as possible. If that can be done in such a way that the delivered tool is still as powerful as SLIME without causing undue confusion, then all the better. "
*exactly* this problem led PLT (1) to develop "DrScheme programming environment" which then later made compatible with book "HtDP" (2) (like we have LispBox for PCL). PLT team is doing great with DrScheme , although i do not like their books but i like this DrScheme. we must learn from the way they solved the problem.
DrScheme is very popular, cross-plateform, newbie-friendly SCHEME programming environment written in SCHEME (of course it is an IDE, have a look @ www.drscheme.org). we can create an IDE for Lisp, call it *LispIsh* for now, written in Lisp. this idea is same as LINUX is a copy of UNIX. so LispIsh will be a copy of DrScheme Programming Environment.
i love "Emacs + M-run-lisp" (M is meta/alt key) and that is not for a newbie. when i tried LIGNUX (well, this name is my invention, as a remedy for the ambiguity of whether LINUX or GNU/Linux ;-) for the first time then i just hated Emacs & kept on using VIM instead, but after 2 months i fell in love with Emacs.
you can check for yourself what exactly is DrScheme & why i like it, more imporatntly why newbies like it.
we can use CLISP for *LispIsh* because of 2 reasons:
- CLISP runs everwhere.
- its error-reporting system is very newbie-friendly, it reports only single sentence of what went wrong, rather than printing lots of horrible-looking expressions e.g. like "error in Kernel" in CMUCL . also it does not land into debugger by itself.
tell me whether you liked the idea or not? BUT make sure you 1st check www.DrScheme.org.
I just want to toss my opinion in about Emacs. It's a very "like it or hate it" editor, unrelated to Lisp. I used to use Emacs in college and picked up an affinity for it... a month with Vim and I can't stand Emacs anymore. Both Emacs and Vim have a huge problem, both for Lisp newbies, and language coders in general. They're very specialized. Emacs has a million different chords, while Vim does everything in the world in 1-keypress (sorta). Either way, both have menu systems that are incapable of matching any "more windowsy" editors. Further, they're quite unforgiving, with accidental keybumps or a mis-remembered key potentially causing devastation.
A windows user starting with Lisp wants the following: 1) A windowsy feel. Even linux users want more GUI integration with their IDEs than you tend to find in the common ones. 2) Speed and usability. Eclipse (only tried for other languages, admittedly) has been woefully slow, and Jabberwocky just blew up on every computer I tried installing it in.
Myself, I want a -clean- IDE, integrated, and stable. I love that about Dr Scheme, but it still suffers with occasional speed and stability issues.
An advanced user might be frustrated with a few lockups in a row, with their IDE... a novice user would just give up.
(1) PLT: "Programming Languages Team" from RICE University, check http://www.cs.rice.edu/CS/PLT/.
(2) www.htdp.org Have you checked LispWorks . It works the same on at leasat three quite popular platform but even on some less popular ones. And it has a truly cross-platform GUI-framework. It has one of the best debuggers today for Lisp AFAIKT, and IMHO it's even better then DrScheme here.
Don't leave out AquaMacs for Mac OS X.
http://aquamacs.org/
SLIME comes already bundled. Also, it translates a lot of the standard Mac OS menu items and keyboard shortcuts to do the corresponding thing in Emacs, making for a less steep learning curve for Mac users.
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