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Comment by aeorgnoieang | Hacker News Reader

> While the industry waits for LightTable and similar tools to mature, Lisp programmers have been silently and haughtily enjoying such capabilities with SLIME for many years.

Were a significant number of Lispers really waiting for LightTable to be usable for them?

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Clojure guy here, FWIW

The big deal with tools like LightTable is it's much easier for newcomers to start working on projects. I understand why a user wouldn't want to learn both a language and an editor. One huge issue we struggle with emacs/slime as the editor of choice. Personally I'm a VIM guy, so I got it working there, but that's after I spent some time deep in Vimscript and fiddling with plugins. It's a lot to ask for people that are new, or those that have an editor of choice that isn't supported.

Did you know emacs has several vi implementations? Many people think they are the best versions of vi.

Except for lisp -- emacs vi implementations don't usually play as well with parenthesis as native emacs, which is superb for lisp coding.

you're wrong - Spacemacs offers very nice tools for structural editing out of the box and including clever-parens layer. You can also use Parinfer or Lispy. You can customize things to your liking using combination of Paredit and Smartparens.

Only tried evil (which I think is the Spacemacs default?) with paredit and while paredit is a truly stellar, evil mode does not play well with it. Perhaps the other paren tools you've mentioned work better with evil? With paredit, evil editing can delete only part of a paren leaving unmatched problems.

paredit + evil-mode is really fantastic

Except that evil mode takes priority over paredit and it is quite possible to delete parens and end up with unmatched.

That’s why you add evil-paredit-mode to fix that

been there, tried it

I doubt many Lispers were because we already have emacs and SLIME. One of the most fun things I did was running a window manager called stumpwm and running swank in that image so it could be modified on the fly with emacs. That's also how you modify emacs itself. It's just so cool to use a tool to modify itself while it's running...

If so, they will sadly be waiting forever, as LightTable is largely dead.

The creator, Chris Granger, abandoned it for his next project, Eve. After it became clear Chris had left, the community tried to pull together and continue, but it looks like it hasn't been updated in months.

Presumably "the industry" ≠ "lisp programmers"...

Almost all clojure ide I have used have similar capabilities to lighttable (emacs, atom, sublime, intellij with plugin) because they know how to talk to the nRepl

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