The problem with almost all LISP tutorials, books,... is there's no guide on how to install toolings at the beginning. Instead, there's just praise and praise.
Such a missed opportunity.
Such a missed opportunity.
If audience is whom who doesn't know anything about LISP, you've lost time to go around to find things you want.
Other languages have playground, or at least INSTALLING at the chapter 1. It should answer some IMPORTANT questions:
- How to install the compiler
- Which IDE best to use, or which extension.
- How to install packages, how to build it.
Literally everything you're asking for is in that link. The author has the opinion that you don't need fancy IDE features which is an arguable point but they do list what editors for each OS work in their experience.
Chapter 2 https://www.braveclojure.com/basic-emacs/ helped me get started with Emacs with just knowledge to be somewhat productive and start learning more.
But for those who like neither Emacs nor Vim ... I don't know.
doom emacs was a game changer for me and allowed me to pretty quickly switch from neovim. Since investing more in the ecosystem, I wont be letting go of emacs anytime soon
I see that in your professional capacity, you're an engineer on VS Code, so I bet that you know it well enough to make it work for you for Common Lisp, too. For all the oft-cited reasons, I cannot use VS Code. But it is great if it works for you.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/CU...
As for CL itself, I dabbled in it in my time, and I found it more interesting to broaden the mind than useful for practical applications. The dearth of quality, well-maintained libraries is the main stumbling block for serious use. It's not that it's impossible - it's just that the effort involved in putting everything together exceeds whatever benefits accrue from the language itself being more powerful than usual.
That aside, though, the discussion was about how getting started with CL for someone new is more complicated than it needs to be in part because the ecosystem is so centered around Emacs for code editing. In general, people who get interested in CL are already devs - but Emacs isn't all that popular even among devs these days; I see Sublime far more often, for example. But all CL tutorials actively push Emacs - and for good reason, since it really is the best option available! - which makes the barrier of entry that much higher for people coming from, say, JS or Python.
In general though, I'd say switch your focus to Scheme, and use Dr.Racket, if you really really don't want to use Emacs.
...SLIMA may work with Pulsar, or if you prefer Eclipse there's Dandelion (https://github.com/Ragnaroek/dandelion).
VSCodium may be able to use Alive, but as it can't fully turn off MS's spyware I can't in good faith recommend it.