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Comment by frollogaston | Hacker News Reader

IF you're running a debug build. I guess Common Lisp can do this in prod?

I mean, so can JavaScript then? Why would I want a debugging window to open up for a customer in production? I remember when Windows used to try to open a debugger when certain programs crashed on me as if I knew what the heck any of that was supposed to mean.

Was assuming it was a backend. I still don't understand the advantage though. It'd help to have an example.

Just finished typing up an example as you wrote this. Rather than duplicate it, here's the link:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49974251

Thing is with .NET you can debug a release build, and even do remote debugging... So it's all a weird claim to me. Definitely someone who only uses Common Lisp and maybe a language with a less impressive debugging background wrote this article.

To be fair, I love Lisp, I dont do a lot with it, though I'm mostly a fan of Racket which is the most modern one outside of maybe Clojure.

Yeah, you don't want a lisp debugging window in production. The absence of stack unwinding does enable editing behavior with wrappers. You could have different error handling without changing any code downstream, and I guess an LLM could theoretically change that depending on the bug it's responding to.

But I'm not positive the juice is worth the squeeze, and this article was unconvincing. I mean if you want macros and terse code and a bigger ecosystem, wouldn't Clojure make more sense?

I imagine production backend with LLM connected using debug interface and patching the code continuously on any exception encounter.

(not a CL expert here)

Erm, sounds niche. Like you can normally do all that minus resuming the program in other languages. If this is a webserver, it should be fine to restart it for an update, it's not like I'm going to catch some user's failed request and patch it before it times out.

Good luck debugging all that minified JS code without a map file. It can be done, but will be very painful.

No debugging window opens up for anybody by default^^ The web server (ex: Hunchentoot) will crash the request's thread and print the backtrace by default. Change a server's variable and print the backtrace in the browser (= dev mode), change another variable and get the interactive debugger (= dev mode++). All this without stopping/restarting the server. Or just restart it if you want.

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