Portacle – A Portable Common Lisp Development Environment

Re:Portacle – A Portable Common Lisp Development Environment by nabla9 on Thursday March 15, 2018 @11:44AM (#16593795)

> - a text editor

Only if you want to teach people to hate s-expressions and write stuff like:

           )
        )
     )

Writing lisp code is different. Pick a good Common Lisp aware editor.

IMHO: For pedagogical reasons Lisp editors should show parens with a color that makes them transparent and almost hides them into background. Parens are there for the editor to find patterns not people to see and match (except maybe one or two most inner levels). You use proper indentation to see the structure just like you do with Python.

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Re:Portacle – A Portable Common Lisp Development Environment by flavio81 on Thursday March 15, 2018 @12:20PM (#16594168)

>Only if you want to teach people to hate s-expressions

This must be stressed. It is very important to use a lisp-aware editor. It doesn't have sense to do stuff that a lisp-editor can do automatically, such as auto-indent, and keeping parens balanced all the time.

Also, a good IDE (such as Portacle) gives very good on-the-fly documentation of function parameters/etc, which makes learning CL much faster.

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Re:Portacle – A Portable Common Lisp Development Environment by uptownfunk on Thursday March 15, 2018 @11:33PM (#16598402)

This is why I said WTF when they tried to introduce us to lisp in CS61A... I thought why would anyone want to program in this. Years later and I am now thinking how wrong I was!

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