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Comment by palish | Hacker News Reader

Programming consists of a few things. An editor, a compiler, source control, and so on.

The editor is particularly important when it comes to being productive. I'm inexperienced with Lisp, and I've found a few things inside Visual Studio that I feel particularly reluctant to part with. "Go to Implementation" is one. I just move the mouse over a function call, press alt-G, and it takes me right to where that function is defined. Another is a complete list of defined procedures for the current file.

Does Lisp have an environment that has similar features?

Shawn

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Shawn,

Try emacs with slime. I think Bill Clementson's Blog has a link to a movie which shows the power of it. I use Visual Studios for my day job. And its poor when compared to emacs+slime. Not only can you goto source code of any function in list by doing Esc-. I really enjoy the fuzzy complete facility. type in a few letters and slime comes up with a likely match for functions you might want to call.

It's definitely worthwhile watching the Slime movie. You can find links to it at http://bc.tech.coop/blog/050728.html

You haven't heard of emacs?

I've heard the name. I didn't know you could specifically write Lisp in it. Thanks.

Is that the only one?

Emacs is the best. It's written in an old dialect of Lisp itself, and you can customize it and script sequences of actions in it with Lisp. It also has SLIME, which is the Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs, (see http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/), which is the most amazing IDE I have ever seen for any language, and I've used VS.NET and Eclipse and all the rest.

That's for Common Lisp (CL), which you may or may not want to develop in; I personally frequently choose to write in CL because it has a very large library, and because it has SLIME.

For Scheme, Emacs is also good, but there isn't something analogous to SLIME.

SLIME has go-to-definition of a function as one of its more basic features, along with auto-completion, convenient listings of arguments when you first write down a call to a particular function, and much more.

Sounds like just the thing, thank you!

I have a quick question that I can't justify creating a new thread about. Since you brought up Lisp implementations though...

I was about to choose to write my programs with SBCL, but it looks like the Win32 port isn't yet complete. Since I'm aiming towards using Lisp in games, speed is an issue, and so is running on Windows. Would you or anyone reccomend a dialect of Lisp which is fast and runs under Windows? Even just 1/4th the speed of C would be excellent.

Ask on the #lisp IRC channel on freenode about whether the SBCL win32 port is complete enough for your purposes. It's coming along. Remember to ask your question and then leave the chat idling, so that if your question isn't answered right away, people who have left it idling and then come back to it can see your question and then answer it.

I believe CLISP runs on Windows. I have no idea whether this is at all practical, since I don't use Windows, but maybe you could use a Unix emulator like Cygwin and run SBCL (and your game) in that, invisibly to the user?

Heh, creative. I'll investigate that. Thanks!

Chicken Scheme compiles to C. It's also directly supported by SWIG, so it's (reasonably) easy to call functions in C DLLs and the like.

Naturally, as a reader of YC news, I have also looked into LISP again lately. While I haven't really tried it yet, I found a LISP plugin for eclipse that is running SBCL on Windows. They claim to be inspired by SLIME. Not sure if it would be possible to get their SBCL to run on Windows standaline, but i was planning to use that plugin (sorry no link, but should be easy to Google).

CL - SLIME

Scheme - quack.el (http://www.neilvandyke.org/quack/) Not so powerfull as SLIME.

AFAIK there was a support for scheme (scheme48) in SLIME. I don't know a status of it.

Here are some links I found helpful when starting out:

http://puggy.symonds.net/~deep/emacside.html - "Emacs as your IDE" (A quick start summary of core commands)

And if you find inspiration useful:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/my-save-excursion.html

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/06/shiny-and-new-emacs-22.html

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/effective-emacs

CLIMACS is also worth a look.

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