The main thing I like is basically you always have a debugger present. When you run into some issue you don't have to restart your program in a debugger and recreate it. Even running in production you can remotely connect to your program and inspect everything about it. Another thing about this is that when exceptions happen you're dropped in the debugger before the stack is unwound, and you generally have options to recover and continue execution without restarting everything and losing your state, which imo is the only sane choice for a dynamic language where you know you will be getting some type errors at runtime in development at least. Everyone knows the frustration of starting some python script, having it run for 10 minutes only to have it crash on some exception that you have to fix and restart. Also I'm not entirely sure why, I think because CL does more checks at compile time, and there is more type checking, I tend to get fewer runtime errors and they're closer to the source of the problem and easier to debug than in other dynamic languages. Then there are questions like what happens to existing instances of classes when you add fields or otherwise change them, which CL handles (https://malisper.me/debugging-lisp-part-3-redefining-classes...), but other language REPLs don't.

Regarding the syntax of those type declarations, it's true I also thought CL was verbose and ugly at first, but it is also extremely flexible through macros and reader macros. At the end of the day I think it's easier to improve that in CL that it is to make other languages support the interactive development of CL which requires fundamentally rewriting the language runtime. For those type declarations specifically, there is serapeum which is a extremely commonly used library, that provides -> for more ergonomic type declarations, ie:

  (declaim (ftype (function (string string) string) concat))

would become: (-> concat (string string) string) there is also https://github.com/lisp-maintainers/defstar for providing more ergonomic type declarations inline in definitions

And this is another thing I'm not sure how to explain, I thought CL is surely more verbose and ugly than python for small scripts, but maybe it's macros will make it cleaner for building large systems. But then when I started writing actual programs, even small programs without any of my own macros, I generally use about 30% less LoC than in python... I've thought about making sly/slime like support for python (built on ipython with autoreload extension) or ruby (with it's fairly new low-overhead debug gem). But at the end of the day support for these things will always be incomplete and a hack compared to CL where it was designed from the start to support it, they run 20-100x slower than CL, and imo their runtime metaprogramming is harder to reason about than CL which is mostly compile time metaprogramming. When I've had to dig into some CL library, which is a lot more often than in those languages because it has 10000x fewer users so of course I will be first to run into some issue, it has generally been easy to understand what is going on and fix it, compared to large codebases in other languages.

Regarding "modern type-safe language", languages with expressive type systems, rust, ocaml, haskell, typescript, etc, can give really confusing type errors, when you get into generics and traits and more expressive stuff. I'm not convinced it's a better development experience than a dynamically typed languages where values have simple types, and when you get a type error you see the actual contents of the variable that is the wrong type and state of the program, at least in the case of CL where the stack isn't unwound on error and runtime is kind of compile-time as you're running all code as you write it. But mostly this sort of interactive development is very hard to implement in static languages, I'm not aware of any that does it. For example even in static langs like ocaml that have a repl through a bytecode interpreter, simple things don't work like say you pass some function as an event handler, and then update the function. As you passed efectively a function pointer to the old definition, rather than a symbol name like lisp, it will be calling the original function not the new version. But the main issue is that efficient staticly typed languages the type system is all at compile time, type information doesn't exist at runtime, which is great for performance, but means you don't get the ability to introspect on your running program like you do in CL and elixir, which personally I value more than full compile-time type checking.

Would I like some new language or heavy modification of existing language runtime that provides the best of everything? of course, but I also realize that it's a huge amount of work and won't happen with 10 years, while I can have a nice experience hacking away in CL and emacs right now. And ultimately CL is an extremely flexible language and I think it'll be less work to build on CL than to provide a CL like runtime for some other language. For example projects really pushing the edge there is Coalton described above. While personally I prefer dynamicly typed for general application programming I think Coalton could be great for compilers, parsing some protocol, or writing some subparts of your program in. And vernacular (https://github.com/ruricolist/vernacular) which explores bringing racket's lang and macro system to CL. For more standard CL code, using extremely common and widely used libraries like alexandria, serapeum, trivia, etc, already makes CL into a fairly modern and ergonomic language to write.

Edit: also about the lack of line numbers in the compiler message, it's funny I never noticed that and I'm not sure how exactly emacs does it, but for those compiler warnings about types emacs underlines in red not just the line but the exact expression within the line and you can press a shortcut to go to the next and previous compiler warning/error/note. For better or worse emacs is the de facto free development environment for CL (lispworks and allegro are the commercial ones still maintained), though in recent years there are plugins for VSCode and most major editors, I haven't tried them and am not sure how they compare.

user:	bo-tato
created:	January 30, 2023
karma:	27