Comment by DrJokepu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DrJokepu | Hacker News Reader

Commenting on the last paragraph: I honestly believe that one of the biggest obstacles for newcomers to Lisp is Emacs.

Don't get me wrong, I love Emacs and it is truly the superior environment to do work in Lisp. However it has a bit of a steep learning curve just like Lisp itself and fighting two battles (one with Lisp and one with Emacs) is no easy task for someone coming from a Java / C# and Eclipse / Visual Studio background. I know because I've been there. That's why I decided to start work on an open source Visual Studio add-in to support for Common Lisp in Visual Studio itself. I think being able to do the first steps in a familiar environment would be a great help for newcomers. I wonder what you guys think of the idea?

As a C# developer in my day job, I think that is a completely awesome idea.

You want LispIDE

http://www.daansystems.com/lispide/

Hardly a substitute for Emacs/Slime, but for beginners, you can get a lot done. I use it when I am not plugged into in A/C outlet; it saves battery ;-)

Yes I know LispIDE, however it is really nothing more than notepad.exe with syntax highlighting and some basic REPL integration. I think of the VS F# editor with REPL ("interactive mode" as it is called there) as an example of what I'm trying to achieve.

The other way round could also work: Make people use Emacs for C first, then switch them to Common Lisp.

(However I like Scheme better anyway.)

I started using emacs as a C programmer; even for C, emacs was a great environment, especially back in 1989; good integration with the compiler and cvs, auto indent, syntax highlighting, etc..

Did you ever tried Drscheme?

Yes, DrScheme is awesome. However, I was specifically thinking of supporting Common Lisp, not Scheme as Scheme already has enough friendly tools for beginners.

How about cusp[1] then? It is an eclipse plugin. Never tried myself, but it could be a starting point.

[1] http://sergeykolos.com/cusp/intro/

Yes, I've never seen that one before but it definitely looks promising. I'll have a look at it and see what it can do.

Why not just bootstrap knowledge of Common Lisp by learning Scheme first, then?

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