As the guy building jank, I agree with you about emacs, chords, etc. I'm a vimmer and I can tell you that Clojure is superb in Vim land (Conjure), VS Code land (Calva), Emacs land (??? some major mode), and IntelliJ land (Cursive).
The javascript/UI people have found live reloading/editing to be a game changer, but this has been the case for lisp development since...well, the beginning!
The 90s with C++ and Java broke with history. Thankfully the rise of web apps has given us iteration speed back!
Visual Age for C++ inherited the Smalltalk experience, alongside Energize C++,provided a similar experience, but were too expensive for early 1990's hardware and too resource hungry.
Live++ brought the experience back to game developers.
Java has supported partial live reloading since early days, and for those willing to pay for it, JRebel takes the experience further, back to Lisp/Smalltalk.
Since I’ve got you here, can I ask you for your thoughts on LispE and how it contrasts with jank’s approach? It seems clear that they both arrive from different lineages of the Lisp kingdom. LispE is also found dangling a few toes at depth within the icy waters of array programming.
Perhaps the only connection between the two is that the one makes me think of the other. But if there’s more, though, I’d love to read about it.
Different lineages, for sure. Clojure really stands on its own in the lisp world and some die-hard lispers claim that it's not a lisp at all. However, for Clojure devs, I think we generally aren't interested in using the other lisps in practice, for building practical software. We just appreciate them for their lispiness. So the main difference will be that LispE is more like CL than like Clojure.
Aside from that, LispE is interpreted, whereas jank is JIT compiled with full AOT compilation support, using LLVM. By using Clang/LLVM, jank also has full access to C++ interop, whereas most interpreted lisps are sandboxes on their own.
I'm not familiar with this side of traditional lisps very much. Someone may be able to jump in to embellish or correct.