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Comment by housecarpenter | Hacker News Reader

> (1) there is very little compile-time error analysis and type declaration

There's been a lot of improvement on that front.

It's still… not the same. In CL (and specially with SBCL), we get compile time (type) errors and warnings at the blink of an eye, when we compile a single function with a keystroke (typically C-c C-c in Slime).

And there's also been improvement, see Coalton for a ML on top of CL. (https://github.com/coalton-lang/coalton/) (and SBCL itself evolves)

I haven't used CL myself, but it wouldn't surprise me if CL does a better job. Just pointing out that Python is significantly better in this respect than it used to be. In particular, using VS Code with Pylance, I can see type errors highlighted as soon as I write the code---I don't even need to use a keystroke. 24 years ago, I don't think anything like that was possible; the language didn't even support type annotations.

It's pretty much impossible to explain to people what it's like to work in a CL environment.

A good presentation on what we're missing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ab3ArE8W3s

If you’re part of the group missing something, how would you know?

I use python/C for my day job and common lisp for my wacky off the clock hacking.

I used to use scheme and racket but the joy of debugging in CL is worth putting up with two (or four) name spaces.

Curiosity beyond your own tools

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