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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

SLIME wasn't released until 2003.

As an active promoter of live programming, I'm totally enthusiastic about code completion using dynamic type information. It just didn't happen before static types. Code completion on dynamic execution context is a bit challenging because you need to surface execution context somehow (which is a problem live programming focuses on).

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>SLIME wasn't released until 2003.

SLIME replicates the same functionality of the Lisp programming environment of the late 1970s, so most of the features have been available for Lisp long, long ago.

Sure? And what were those features? As far as I know, most lisp IDEs had feature sets similar to enclave, which meant simple string-based code completion most of the time.

it looks like guile's readline came in 97, with tab completion added in 98

Tab completion is often a small subset of code completion. When I think of tab completion I think of it being able to complete something you start typing based on what it knows to exist, but rarely does it understand much context.

Code completion meanwhile knows context much better.

right, context did exist at that point but seems limited to filenames, and symbols afaict, obviously though you can obtain much more context in a statically typed environment

It is this 'obviously' that I am challenging. It might seem easier to do it for statically typed languages, but it is not something that is only possible there.

Note, I am decidedly not claiming it is easier in a dynamic language. Just making the claim that it is possible in both.

I suppose yes, I could see such a thing working in the style of "A unified approach to solving seven programming problems" perhaps 'naively' would be the right word

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