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A Video Tutorial of SLIME

Posted by timothy on from the no-really-that's-the-name dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Ok, maybe I exaggerated a bit with the subject; however, you can check it out for yourself and decide. Marco Baringer has published a video (.mov available for the bittorent impaired) showing off the Common Lisp IDE SLIME. It's a long movie (almost an hour) and provides an in-depth description of many of SLIMES's features which just aren't available (or even possible) in 'modern' IDEs/languages."

1 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. Common Lisp by Julian+Morrison · · Score: 3, Informative

    CL is much "closer to the metal" than Haskell or even OCAML and it's designed to compile to efficient code. As a result it's not particularly "functional" (nowhere near as much as Scheme, for example). CMUCL compiled lisp should approximately match native-compiled OCAML in speed, and CL has an advantage in being a multiple-sourced standard.

    Main advantages of CL

    - Scalable ratio of easy:fast. Prototype lazily and tune iteratively.

    - Macros facilitate "little languages" for task areas, making core algorithms terse and readable.

    - Running apps can be hot-debugged, tested and recompiled in situ.

    - Exception mechanism provides something I've seen nowhere else, namely the ability to catch an exception, repair the problem, and reverse the thow to resume where the code left off.

    Main serious problems with CL

    - Too many fiddly features makes writing a compiler hard

    - Lack of a good standalone-binary compiler.

    - Weakly standardized library mechanism makes cross-implementation libraries unnecessarily hard and hence rare. (NB: "common lisp controller" is a fix for this and standard in Debian.)

    - No fixed standard for foreign function interface (or requirement that one even exist).

    - No sockets or threading in the standard library.