
Notes on Interactive Computing Environments - grzm
http://blog.fogus.me/2019/04/03/notes-on-interactive-computing-environments/
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mark_l_watson
Good write up Michael. I am still a little sad that InterLisp is, as you say,
relegated to the dustbin of history - even though I only used InterLisp for a
year before Xerox switched my 1108 to Common Lisp.

There are many interesting interactive systems being built, but not always
used much. I spent some time playing with Glamorous Toolkit for Pharo
Smalltalk on Saturday because I have a conference call this Thursday that the
author will be on - I wanted to check out his ideas which are basically code
in a live data environment and save code so that it can be refactored, run,
etc. in the system code browser.

I really love the idea of building a language up in layers to become an
application specific language. I mostly use Common Lisp now and the developer
experience is very different than it used to be. As great as Lisp machines
were, I am going to be a bit of a heretic and say that I much prefer my
current setup with amazingly fast hardware with a GPU when I need it, SBCL,
and Quicklisp to help me keep my code organized and mix in other peoples’
libraries.

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Gehinnn
I am pretty happy with what you can do with Javascript/TypeScript. I
implemented a hot reload solution for nodejs a few months ago (@hediet/node-
reload): It restarts stack frames automatically when it detects that its
function body has changed during execution. This is particularly useful when
debugging, even if the function is not pure. Together with my extension
hediet.debug-visualizer for vscode that visualizes data structures while
stepping through code, it feels pretty close to an interactive programming
environment. I implemented almost all of my TypeScript AST processing tools
this way and would feel pretty helpless now without it.

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segmondy
I own a copy of this book and it's one of the computing books that I own that
makes me sad, because you realize how far we have come and yet how little
progress we have made too compared to where we should be.

When folks ask me what IDE I use, I tell them Unix and I get strange looks. I
use to try to explain, but I don't. If they get it they get it, if they don't
oh well. As a polygot I can't couple myself to any language specific GUI IDE.
Unix & vim has served me all these years and my workflow is still the same.
Yet I know it's still very primitive.

Working with lisp/clojure, smalltalk, python, prolog, apl/j, forth and using
emacs yields the same experience. perhaps some javascript.

The only serious attempt I have seen to move this field forward was by Bret
Victor
[http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/](http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/)

