On Monday, September 14, 2015 at 8:21:41 AM UTC-4, Joshua Ballanco wrote: ...
> > I suppose you could also take the counter-counterpoint of LISP. People not > only built IDEs but entire *machines* tailored specifically to running and > debugging LISP, and it still hasn’t (really) caught on (yet). > Yes, I used the Lisp Machines back in the early 80's at MIT, absolutely wonderful, Lisp everywhere, and it was all integrated with a *real* editor (Emacs!), that was written in Lisp as well (so very very easy to customize / extend). Way ahead of its time (or everything else was way behind) > That said, I think the Clojure community provides a useful example for how > to approach the editor/IDE debate. All the early Clojure developers used > emacs, and much of the early community was either on emacs or vim (yes, > there were a few of us). In the intervening 7 or so years, though, as new > developers who were familiar with other IDEs entered the community, they > began projects to develop plugins for their IDE of choice. As such, Clojure > now has first-rate plugins for both Eclipse and IntelliJ. > > It was really only later that projects were started to build “true” > Clojure IDEs, and still I don’t think any of these surpass (or even really > approach) the utility of the IDE plugins (the three IDEs of which I’m aware > are: LightTable, NightCode, and clooj). > > One important element that allowed much of this for Clojure was the early > development of nREPL, the network-enabled REPL. With this, all editors/IDE > plugins stand on equal footing with access to the REPL. I noticed in the > code to REPL.jl there’s a function `start_repl_server`, but it doesn’t seem > to be used anywhere. > > If I had to pick someplace to focus effort on improving tooling for Julia > in general, I’d look at improving/adding a network interface to the REPL. > I thought Keno already had something like that? (if it he doesn't already, I'm sure he could do it over the weekend, procrastinating a bit more on his degree!) Scott
