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Comment by martyalain | Hacker News Reader

I am not a professional coder, just an amateur. Following the example of LISP, and even lambda-calculus, I was able to build a text editor with a programming language, working on any web browser: http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/ , that I use daily to compose quite complex documents containing code evaluated in realtime. I would not have even thought of undertaking such an exercise without the existence of LISP.

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Interesting. Can you share the text editor? Can I try it out somewhere? Is the editor itself written in Lisp?

Yes you can. Follow explanations in http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks . The evaluator is written in javascript and the editor is just PHP. You can freely download from http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/?view=download and your opinion is welcome.

Speaking of text editors, I think one thing that hampers adoption of lisps is being a bit more beginner unfriendly, at least for most implementations. The developing environment is trickier to set up, and a common recommendation I often hear is to learn Emacs first, what is quite a upfront investment, while in, say, python, you can just launch IDLE and start working in a basic, but proper environment right away.

Good news, today SLIMA for Atom is easy to set up. Alive for VSCode is getting there. See more: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht... (But I agree, the editor question was slowing adoption.)

> I think one thing that hampers adoption of lisps is being a bit more beginner unfriendly

I realize you're talking mainly (exclusively?) about the editor situation, with which I don't disagree; but aside from that, I feel like learning Lisp as my first language sort of brain-damaged me for learning other languages, even ones thought to be simple to get started with like js or Python. The Lisp syntax and programming model are so simple to wrap your mind around that everything else, to me at the time anyway, looked noisy and inconsistent. Then I discovered Tcl and Prolog, found them as easy as Lisp to work with, and discovered I just have a super low tolerance for syntactic complexity.

Interesting link - but I was thrown by the two-way scrolling for a bit!

since I discovered this presentation I can't do without it, especially on a tablet or smartphone. And on a big screen the zoom effects are amazing...

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