Gregory's ServerTheory: is #Emacs being “good enough” why no #Lisp has a fantastically integrated development environment (including GUI toolkit) like every extant Smalltalk implementation has? Because as far as I can tell, Lisp machines *did* have a Smalltalk-like environment, but since Emacs existed nobody bothered to try implementing an equivalently featureful environment after Lisp machines stopped being a thing
 7 comments
@otfrom Yeah, being able to work with any text is nice. All I want is something like the Smalltalk system browser where I don't need to worry about organizing or navigating files and can sort code however most makes sense, like a full tree of methods, or everything in a package, or whatever.  @nytpu I'm wondering if some of that is coming with some of the modable emacs ideas and things that can be done with tree-sitter in emacs 29. I'd like to have the best of both worlds. Having strong tools to fall back on with text was really good for working in novel areas. @nytpu @nytpu There are a few efforts that trying to get a similar environment within Common Lisp: https://codeberg.org/mmontone/mold-desktop/ and https://project-mage.org/ @nytpu That may be part of it, but I think another issue here is that Lisp has never been monolithic like Smalltalk, and the Lisp standard (at least CL) has no GUI toolkit primitives.  @nytpu yes — and maybe that’s because Emacs is a fantastically integrated development environment including cross-platform GUI toolkit that even works on the terminal … Also Dr. Racket. |
@nytpu my theory is that for a long time unix has been such an amazing text environment that opens emacs up to being lispy in so many other environments. Smalltalk has always seemed like a very shiny box to be locked into.