
Sly: Sylvester the Cat's Common Lisp IDE - molteanu
https://github.com/joaotavora/sly
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xuejie
Just curious: other than established convention, is there anything that
Sly/Slime provide that are still missing in Language Server
Protocol([https://langserver.org/](https://langserver.org/))? Would it benefit
more to move to a lsp-based solution so we can make Common Lisp more modern-
editor friendly?

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Bizarro
Was just thinking that if I could get a decent editor experience in VSCode,
I'd love to play around with Common Lisp again.

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S4M
Honest question: what is preventing you from trying Common Lisp in Emacs?

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Bizarro
I've been down the Emacs road a couple times. It's just not going to happen.
It comes down to to time. I have a limited amount of it and investing in Emacs
isn't worth it. Obviously Emacs will have users for years to come, but its
future is bleak.

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cityroasted
That's a strange thing to say. GNU Emacs has been around 33, years, is still
very actively developed, is GPL so could be forked, and seems more popular
than ever. You don't have to justify your decision to not use Emacs by saying
Emacs has a bleak future. I think Emacs probably has the most secure future of
any text editor or IDE.

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Bizarro
No reason to get defensive and down vote for things you have no personal stake
in.

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oblio
Developers do have stakes in programming languages and programming tools. You,
yourself, said that you don't want to invest in Emacs. Someone who has
invested a ton in mastering Emacs at this point has a personal stake in it. He
wants it to thrive and have high adoption.

That being said, I'm actually in the same camp with you, on both counts (this
comment and your previous one).

My main problem with Emacs is that of mindshare. To clarify what that means,
I'll use some examples.

Git has huge mindshare: if a new development tool appears, if it can integrate
with Git, its makers will try to integrate it themselves. This generally
provides the best and most maintained integration.

Emacs has low mindshare: if a new development tool appears, Emacs users have
to integrate it themselves. Outside of the relatively small Lisp community,
almost no upstream developer is bothering to offer Emacs integration.

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cityroasted
I'm not sure I understand your example. Emacs integrates, it doesn't need to
be integrated. It also has the best git interface I have ever seen (magit).

In a certain sense a subclass of Emacs users _are_ the makers since it is a
traditional Free Software model not backed by a major corporation. But that
can be seen as an advantage since there is no single point of failure, and if
GNU doesn't do a good job it can be forked, and has in the past (remember
XEmacs?).

Practically speaking, the major disadvantage of Emacs is poor asynchronous/
multithreaded support. That's not an easy problem to solve but I do think it
will get better eventually, and I don't find it a major impediment in day-to-
day use.

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oblio
Well, if you want a clear example of what I mean, Jetbrains makes a plugin for
Kotlin for their IDE and another one for Eclipse. They don't make one for
Emacs. The Emacs community has to make it (maybe they do, I don't know).

Look at any tool (except for GNU or Lisp stuff) and try to see how many of
them have Emacs plugins made directly by the tool authors.

Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, Atom, etc., tend to have plugins made directly by
the tool authors, in many cases.

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TheCraiggers
I've been a vi user for all of my Linux computing life. Watching the gifs in
this repo put me in the shoes of coworkers watching me type in arcane symbols
in vi to do 'magic'.

I feel like I should give emacs a download and try to wrap my brain around it,
if for no other reason than to be more well-rounded.

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agambrahma
Is this somehow tied to SBCL, or generally useful across all implementations
(e.g. Lispworks) ?

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Zuider
It is a slimmed down, modernized fork of Slime. Slime works across all Common
Lisp implementations. Sly takes advantage of improvements to Emacs Elisp
implemented in Emacs 24.3 and higher. So it looks like it is not tied to any
particular Common Lisp implementation, but you need to use a modern Emacs.

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fovc
Modern is a relative term. 24.3 was released in 2013!

