What I want — what I really really want — is an Allegro CL experience. Unfortunately, nothing provides it, nor does it look like anyone has any interest in providing such an experience.
This isn’t just a CL problem. Janky debugger integration is widespread. It’s the pathetic that only commercial developers provide a polished debugging experience. Everyone else is satisfied with a basically a CLI tool running separately in a window. That’s like. 80% solution. We can do better. We should do better.
The sly debugger is better than most debuggers, but calling it the most powerful debugging experience is a stretch. Just try the debuger in a Smalltalk implementation (Squeak/Pharo/Cuis)
Saying that you just have to watch a bunch of tutorials betrays just how janky it is.
Tucked away in the McCLIM project is Clouseau, which you can quickload and use as a normal user: https://codeberg.org/McCLIM/McCLIM/src/branch/master/Apps/Cl... One small cool thing it does is if you inspect a complex number it will also draw a little x-y graph with its vector representation. (Though trying it out again just now it's overlapping with the text... maybe I should file a bug, but I've only now just learned they moved off github, and I'm not going to make a codeberg account. Friction wins this round.) It does take a while to first compile and load all the dependencies, especially 3bz, another weakness of at least our free Lisps; AFAIK there's still no equivalent of make -j for compiling systems.
I'm a happy vim user (though there is some jank with slimv, admittedly, but it's mostly prevalent around multiple thread situations) and setup the command ,ci to call my own clouseau-inspect function; it just inspects a symbol with clouseau instead of slimv's inspector. Also have a janky watch/unwatch pair of functions that just refreshes the inspector every second. (https://github.com/Jach/dots/blob/master/.sbclrc#L113 if curious, some other junk in .swank.lisp and .vimrc too, and there's https://github.com/dense-analysis/ale/issues/4061 to call sblint on your project...)
But more graphical tools like this are what I hope to one day see more of and are how the free Lisps can close the gap in this area with the commercial Lisps. I believe there's not much Allegro can do that poking around SBCL can't do, but for many things it's just nicer to have a GUI. Want to explore all the symbols and values in a package? Easy enough to script that, but not as nice as just having a table of symbols, and even nicer if you can set watches on some of them, or even set conditional breakpoints on value changes. None of the tools need to be tightly integrated with a single IDE either, because all the stuff necessary to debug Lisp is in the running Lisp itself. It's just that the GUI situation continues to suck.
LSP has gotten more popular with other languages and editors, sometimes I wonder if the acronym was made as an inside joke because it's basically how Lisp + Slime/Swank have worked...
I have been intending on trying the latest free IDE from Franz. Two days ago I was in a fun catch-up video call with Jans Aasman from Franz, but we were talking about AI more generally, not Common Lisp specifically.
(I just corrected mine, which was in this same comment. Corrected info below.)
I had tried out Allegro Common Lisp (which is from Franz, Inc.) and LispWorks Common Lisp, some years ago.
Maybe sometime after Peter Seibel's book Practical Common Lisp came out.
I had also tried out GNU Lisp at some point.
Eclipse can also produce reasonable debugging for Java at least.
But yes other than that poor debuggers do limit the choice of languages.
Unfortunately PHP is better served than most interesting languages.
Eclipe was born as a rewrite from Visual Age for Smalltalk into Java.
See the difference?
(ps: see slime-breakpoints for a nice graphical addition: https://github.com/mmontone/slime-breakpoints)
