[HN Gopher] Inline previous result in Emacs Lisp
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       Inline previous result in Emacs Lisp
        
       Author : clircle
       Score  : 103 points
       Date   : 2024-07-06 17:33 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (xenodium.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (xenodium.com)
        
       | anonzzzies wrote:
       | Makes me think of Light Table. Does this exist for Common Lisp?
        
         | thenonameguy wrote:
         | I'm not certain, but Clojure supports this through CIDER's
         | Enlighten mode:
         | https://docs.cider.mx/cider/debugging/enlighten.html
         | 
         | It would be even better if larger values were inspectable, as
         | it becomes challenging to view more complex data types beyond
         | numbers and short strings.
        
           | medstrom wrote:
           | The "inline" thingy can be seen as a popup/tooltip, could
           | span many lines.
        
         | darby_nine wrote:
         | For those like me who have never heard of it, I think OP is
         | referring to this: http://lighttable.com
        
           | slowmovintarget wrote:
           | Last touched three years ago. Interesting that someone came a
           | long to give it a coat of paint (Electron update,
           | ClojureScript update... etc.).
        
         | vindarel wrote:
         | It makes me think of Lem's `watch` that displays s-expr results
         | in an overlay, much like CIDER's Enlighten, somewhat like
         | LightTable: https://lem-
         | project.github.io/usage/common_lisp/#watch
         | 
         | There's sly-overlay too: https://git.sr.ht/~fosskers/sly-
         | overlay (a couple function changes away to have it on Slime)
         | 
         | but those are not inside the stepper. (edit) oh, there's Sly-
         | stickers: https://joaotavora.github.io/sly/#Stickers
         | 
         | LispWorks has a more graphical stepper / debugger so we might
         | look into it.
         | 
         | There might be sthg on the newer CLOG?
        
       | neilv wrote:
       | Nice enhancement to EDebug.
       | 
       | If anyone is wondering about Nyan Cat in the "after" screen
       | capture: https://github.com/TeMPOraL/nyan-mode
        
         | jayemar wrote:
         | Any idea what theme that is? It looks really nice.
        
       | taeric wrote:
       | Nicely done! Will be playing with that shortly.
       | 
       | I'm always a touch sad that I don't step debug code more than I
       | do. I remember the glory days of people pushing this in Java with
       | the Eclipse compiler literally made to support incremental
       | compilation. I think it was JRebel that was working to do that at
       | large on other installations.
       | 
       | Fast forward a few years, and I would get into conversations with
       | principal level engineers at amazon that didn't know this was
       | possible. Having the debug agent was literally a default for some
       | teams, and they didn't realize what all that enabled.
       | 
       | What happened? Feels that a lot of old school programmers of any
       | language remember doing this. Too many others think this is some
       | sort of magical world dreamed of by lisp enthusiasts that never
       | actually happened.
       | 
       | (Would love to see numbers challenging any of my soft assertions
       | above.)
        
         | projektfu wrote:
         | Yes, this incremental approach was common in Smalltalk and Lisp
         | Machine environments, then obviously in Common Lisp. IBM Visual
         | Age for Java originally was like a Java veneer over the
         | Smalltalk environment, then they came out with VA Micro Edition
         | which, iirc, still supported incremental work. Around this
         | time, Visual Basic 5.0 and later also were supporting an edit
         | and continue approach and Microsoft started trying to get it
         | into Visual C++ 6.0, although it was limited in what you could
         | change before recompiling. By the time Eclipse came out, they
         | were trying to stay competitive. What happened?
         | 
         | The Web. Web 2.0, really. Now you can't easily do the code as
         | you go approach, it needs to be restarted in the server, the
         | client needs to be updated, etc. Any hacks that make it
         | possible are pretty fragile. People still like live-coding, but
         | they don't expect to do it for the whole project.
        
       | alex_smart wrote:
       | THIS right here is why I use emacs. Not that something like this
       | is not possible with other open-source software, but the number
       | of steps required to compile, debug, identify change required,
       | compile, rerun, it is usually not worth your time to investigate
       | minor inconveniences. So there is learned helplessness and you
       | compromise and learn to just live with the annoyance.
       | 
       | With Emacs you truly feel to be in control.
        
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       (page generated 2024-07-09 23:00 UTC)