this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
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A community for the Lisp family of programming languages.

Lisp (historically LISP) is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language. Only Fortran is older, by one year.

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The lost cause of the Lisp machines (www.tfeb.org)
submitted 2 days ago by yogthos@lemmy.ml to c/lisp@lemmy.ml
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[–] solrize@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

All that’s really missing is having a network API that would let you connect an editor to the running app, and reload functions.

Erlang has that :).

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Erlang OTP is great in particular since it can run a huge number of green processes, and orchestrate them as needed.

I stil find Lisps have the best tooling for REPL driven development though. I've worked with Clojure for many years, and it's still by far my favorite language because of the interactive workflow, I just couldn't go back now.

[–] solrize@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Pretty much everything has a REPL now. The Lisp machine was way ahead in terms of interactive debugging. I still can't believe that after all these years, stock Python doesn't have a way to trap to a debugger when your program throws an uncaught exception. I've never used Clojure though. I do think the language itself has some cool ideas.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Pretty much everything absolutely does not have a REPL you can connect an editor to and develop your application interactively. This workflow is still pretty much exclusive to Lisps today. There's a huge difference between having REPL as a standalone toy, and actually having it as an integral part of the workflow.

The way I develop applications in Clojure is by first running the whole app, then connecting my editor to it. I have access to the entire application state, any resources such as database connections, I can change any part of the application at runtime and see the results immediately. I can even connect to remote apps and debug an app in prod. When I write new code, I do it interactively step by step. I write a function, see that it works correctly, then write the next, and so on. At each step I know exactly what's going on because I'm running my code live. The only context I need to keep is the function I'm currently working on and the last one I wrote. Trying things, and making changes becomes a much tighter loop with this approach.

[–] solrize@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Python, Ruby, and even Forth have REPLs that I use all the time. Haskell sort of has one. Not C++ etc though.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

I've just explained the difference between these REPLs and what Lisp REPL workflow is like. It's not comparable even in the slightest. Actually read what I wrote above and then try doing that in Python or Ruby.