A catalog of possible development environments suitable for newbies.

Team Members

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Feel free to do some research and post it here

Ideal Criteria

• Cross platform
• Easy to install
• Fully functional
• Free (as in beer)
• Windows support
• ASDF support
• Minimal learning curve

Lisp in a Box

Installs a combination of tools to create a one stop LISP IDE.

• GNU Emacs - customizable text editor
• Support for a variety of LISP implementations
• SLIME - turns Emacs into LISP IDE
• ASDF - used to load Common Lisp libraries

Supported Platforms

• Windows - binaries
• Linux - source

Supported Windows LISPs

• CLISP 2.33 - free speech
• Allegro ACL - commercial
  Trial version - 60 day renewable licence, limited heap
  Commercial version - $599

Pros

Cons

• No longer maintained
• Parts of Emacs left (tutorial...what else?)
• Emacs is not newbie-friendly

LispBox

Version 'Lisp in a Box' of by Peter Seibel. It includes the following additional features:

• Full GNU Emacs included
• Code from 'Practical Common Lisp' ready to be loaded using ASDF

Pros

• Still maintained
• Feature-rich setup

Cons

• Emacs is not newbie-friendly

Jabbberwocky

IDE written in Java.

Features

• Editor with syntax coloring and code completion
• Interaction pane with the LISP process
• Browser of the sources,functions,macros etc..
• Source level debugger (the successor of Lisp Debug)

Pros

• Easy to install
• Easy to get started in
• Editor is simpler than Emacs

Cons

• LISP is installed separately
• Java apps are notoriously quirky
• Current dev version (2.0) seems like the way to go but is buggy
• Editor is less powerful than Emacs

Eclipse

Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on providing an extensible development platform and application frameworks for building software.

This looks like a pretty mature open source IDE that supports Java and C++.

How about some reviews of LISP plugins for Eclipse? If they work this could be a great IDE.

• eCLisp
• Lemonodor Lisp Eclipse
• Lisp Eclipse Plug-in - supports CLISP!
• SchemeScript
• CUSP - supports SBCL on Linux, Windows and Mac OS/X
• Others?

General Issues

• Emacs is a barrier to entry

  Is there a way to get newbies over the Emacs/Slime hump faster?

  What about XEmacs? In my opinion it is much more newby friendly compared to Emacs. - SKS

  Is it enough to make Emacs more "Windows-friendly" through control key remapping (and whatever other means are available) for the Windows emacs-included lispbox?

• Good Windows support is crucial.

  Right now there is no ASDF Universality for native windows.

Gardeners Roll Their Own

What LISP for Windows?

An analysis of Windows Implementations

What IDE?

Emacs/Slime vs. various other "simpler" options

Please feel free to debunk this notion of "simpler" but it must be valid from a newbie perspective.

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.

If there's any confusion due to "simpler" being read as a functionality requirement, I propose we adopt the term "usability". - josh g.

Easymacs

Easymacs is a newbie-friendly configuration for GNU Emacs. I have added Slime to it in order to try to address this problem. I think it goes a long way towards presenting Slime as an easy to use IDE for a user who doesn't know Emacs.

• Standard keystrokes for basic operations (Ctrl-S to save, Ctrl-O to open, etc.)
• Powerful functions are bound to Function keys, as well as to chords.
• No tutorial, no big learning curve.
• Identical behavior across platforms.
• Key-bindings are documented.
• There are Function Key bindings for commonly-used Slime commands.
• Easy to install.
• Includes the draft CL spec as texinfo (Shift-F1 for help on the symbol at the cursor).

The drawbacks I can think of are: depends on installing CVS Emacs, which is not as easy as it might be (of course this problem will go away when the next release of Emacs happens); Slime may need to be updated frequently. On OSX, the Fink-unstable version of Emacs (Emacs22) works very well with both Easymacs and Slime.

I disagree with the statement below which says that it may be better to go with platform-specific solutions at the moment. I think it's better not to spinter an already small communitity of volunteers (and of newbies). Right now, if someone wanted to, they could package up CVS Gnu Emacs, Clisp and Easymacs for GNU/Linux, Mac and Windows, and you would have a powerful, easy to use, easy to install development environment. Throw in a bunch of essential libraries, too (especially those that would help users coming from other languages): CL-FAD, CL-PPCRE, CL-INTERPOL, etc. This setup might not be perfect (no threads), but it would be a pretty good start. -Peter H.

How Important is Cross Platform

It may be better to give users the best experience available for their platform until cross-platform realities improve.

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