My Thoughts

I gotta tell you; when I started out with PLT Scheme, I wouldn't have thought I'd end up here. Here being an Emacs using CL-slinger.

It just sort of snuck up on me. It's really embarassing now, but the thing that tipped the scales most strongly in favor of PLT when I was starting out was the goddamn shiny IDE. It didn't enter into it how terse or how flexible the system was, all that mattered was that it be simple to use. This may be a primary driving force behind the general IDE craze that seems to be raging through development communities lately. It might just be my perspective, but it's feeling awful lonely over here in Emacs land¹. There are [some](http://bc.tech.coop/blog/) popular adherents out there, but by and large, people I talk to these days hack primarily in MSVS or Eclipse. Hell, I went to the Toronto Lisp Users group last week, where you'd think there would be lots of support for Emacs, only to find that it was me by my lonesome. One guy hacked on Clojure in Eclipse, two of them used LispWorks and one didn't comment. The IDEs are winning in terms of number of users at least. Not sure whether it's a win on the productivity end, but hey.

So I guess it's not that embarassing.

Once I got hooked by the IDE, and the docs, and the package, it all just seemed so nice. Certainly better than my days hacking on Python/PHP (and even slightly better than my half-year of toying with Erlang). I never did figure out the profiler, but the macro stepper was really cool, and having errors highlighted with little arrows in DrScheme is so sweet that I actually started welcoming them for a while there. Slowly though, stuff changed. Without even realizing it, I was spending more and more time in Emacs. Whether in an editing mode, or the built-in git mode, or eshell, Emacs was starting to become my window manager. Before I noticed the change, I was using run-scheme rather than the IDE. I still had to pull it out for macro stepping, but it was tolerable.

Then I realized that I was really using three or four different libraries out of one category, and all of them were available for Common Lisp. Then I realized that CL also has a PDF-generating library. Aged and imperative, yes, but at least I wouldn't have had to roll my own that way. When the realization finally hit me that Emacs won in my mind, I sat down and thought about what really makes sense for me development-wise. Turns out that if you already know Emacs, and you already know a couple of lisps in addition to CL, SLIME is the best IDE you could hope for. Along with the built-in git support, swank, lisp-mode keybindings and auto-complete-mode, SLIME's REPL/macroexpander/documentation-lookup/profiler push the environment over the edge.

So I hack on Common Lisp now, I guess. Man, I'd better get around to replacing that logo bar, it's getting pretty dated. ²

1. Hello from 2016. Yes; this was entirely my (still very limited) perspective. There's still a large and thriving editor-using community. Granted, since more and more development seems to be done on OS X by youngsters, there's more Sublime than Emacs or Vim, but its been a very long time indeed since I've seen someone pull out eclipse.↩
2. Hello from 2016 again. I believe at this point, the logo bar was just Python, Ruby, Javascript, Erlang, and Racket. So this would have been the day I added Emacs Lisp and Common Lisp.↩