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Well reasoned for the most part, but Lisp has occupied the high ground for development tools for a long time (REPL, SLIME, trace/untrace, step, describe/inspect, room, macroexpand). Other languages have been playing catch up in this regard as well. Whether Lisp still occupies the high ground today is unclear, but it is erroneous to say that Lisp programmers envy the development tools of other languages.

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Good point about slime (its my development environment of choice). Lisp tools are built for dynamic development from the ground up, so on that aspect they are very good. However finding a lisp source stepper that works has been an exercise in frustration for me. The best one ive found so far has been the PLT scheme stepper that mostly works.

With regard to development tools, maybe he was referring to libraries and community support.

Perl, a slow language criticized for its syntax and bearing the stigma of being a mere scripting language, is often lauded as having huge community support and tons of helpful (even if often crappy) libraries via CPAN. C++ has similar support (no CPAN that I am aware of, but I have always quickly found solutions and libraries with the search engine).

Granted, CL can connect via U/CFFI to any external library, but it is harder to find the wrappers for CL than C/C++ header files.

Insert Clojure rant here :)

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