I have tasted development on Smalltalk, with Common Lisp on modern tools, and even with Symbolics Genera 8.3/8.5. The kind of environment they provide pretty much by default an environment that at best you're going to have to bring with yourself in case of JS - in case of modern Lisp, it's usually a matter of installing an IDE plugin first though, but commercial stuff comes with IDEs as well.
The best of "built in" support for JS in browsers pales in comparison to what was one mouse click away under Genera. Similarly most desktop/server environments except niche ones (Erlang ones? modern Lisps, Smalltalks). Even the better parts of less capable language tooling is often overlooked (advanced debugger support in things like Visual Studio, etc.)
That paragraph is nowhere near ridiculous to anyone who actually used the tools, even if they agree with the dissenting voice about NT with (D)COM that was written on symbolics lisp user groups ~1995 - because the process described there is also now often disregarded unless one develops exclusively for Windows.
I have tasted development on Smalltalk, with Common Lisp on modern tools, and even with Symbolics Genera 8.3/8.5. The kind of environment they provide pretty much by default an environment that at best you're going to have to bring with yourself in case of JS - in case of modern Lisp, it's usually a matter of installing an IDE plugin first though, but commercial stuff comes with IDEs as well.
The best of "built in" support for JS in browsers pales in comparison to what was one mouse click away under Genera. Similarly most desktop/server environments except niche ones (Erlang ones? modern Lisps, Smalltalks). Even the better parts of less capable language tooling is often overlooked (advanced debugger support in things like Visual Studio, etc.)
That paragraph is nowhere near ridiculous to anyone who actually used the tools, even if they agree with the dissenting voice about NT with (D)COM that was written on symbolics lisp user groups ~1995 - because the process described there is also now often disregarded unless one develops exclusively for Windows.