But taking from my own experience again, when I took my second job writing professional Java, Eclipse was basically mandatory, which I hadn't needed really before, plus there were some company-specific extensions you had to install to make it work better, and anyway it took me a while to get used to Eclipse itself and learn the shortcuts. One of these days I should try out and maybe I can just recommend it, I know someone made a server for CL that just wraps the classic one, which should let any editor with an LSP client have a good experience. need to have something that can talk to a REPL, and not just a pure text editor. On the other hand if you want a more "professional" environment, is it really reasonable to expect to not have to spend some time setting things up? Especially with CL where if you want more than the bare-bones experience, i.e.
If you were doing an intro-to-programming course for highschoolers, would you have them setup much beyond any random text editor and telling them how to execute stuff? If you launch SBCL by itself (it's even better with rlwrap), you can just play in the REPL. If you've installed SBCL, you just have to run `sbcl -script file.lisp`. This was fine, and still is fine! You can have this bare-bones experience with CL, too. When I played with Scheme (by following some of SICP), I changed things up a bit to also match what I had started doing with Python, which was I'd still edit/save/run most things, but occasionally I'd copy-paste from the editor to the REPL and play in the REPL directly for a while, copying stuff back out if it was useful. No syntax highlighting or indentation, I didn't appreciate those until after I had made the switch to vim sometime in 2007, though even my vim usage was pretty bare-bones for a while.īut still, for the longest time I just edited files, saved (and maybe FTP'd or compiled), and executed either in the command line or by pointing my browser at the files. My "setup" for most of them was the same, just EditPad Lite, which was better than Notepad only in two ways: you could have multiple files open in tabs, and you could just save-as blah.ext without having to first select "all file types" so you didn't end up with. I'm curious what languages do you use, or have used, that have shaped your expectations of setup? Do you remember what the first time setup was like for them? For me, I first started learning PHP in 2004, and over the next few years learned or played with JavaScript/Java/Python/Perl/Ruby/C/C++/Scheme (Java and "C with classes" C++ mostly in highschool).
Of course for many systems vim can be a bit of a pain to install for the first-timer, too, though I think less so than emacs or one of its many flavors.įor the price of an email address, you can download one of the proprietary CL IDEs and try it out, maybe by following their instructional videos/slides Then after that you can be better informed if you want to pay for their IDE (or check out the other proprietary competition) or invest effort in emacs/vim/the atom plugin/something else. FWIW I use vim with the slimv plugin for CL, it works great.