What debugging ought to feel like (video) | Hacker News Reader

What debugging ought to feel like (video)

guba.com

Please note that this is from 2004 and the configuration stuff is way out of date. You should probably just start at 7:30.

In case you'd like to play it offline: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/223699/slime.flv.zip

You can also get it here: http://common-lisp.net/project/movies/movies/slime.mov

No, this:

http://tinyurl.com/ylfqp37

is what debugging ought to feel like.

SLIME is a cheap imitation.

I had a brief fling with Common Lisp a few years ago and I definitely miss Slime. I wish other language implementations would provide a networked repl and tight emacs integration. Neither of the Schemes I use (plt, gambit) work with Slime and Clojure's Slime integration had some annoying issues when I last checked about 6 months ago.

People might tell you that it works "great" (I've heard this numerous times), but it turns out they mean it in a very limited sense:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/aa9zf/why_i_cho...

Yeah, I always suspected this. I never found any langauge other than Common Lisp to be very good with Slime. CL itself, however, tends to be excellent.

I am writing a similar integration layer for Perl, but decided not to reuse the Swank protocol. The Emacs side is just not quite flexible enough.

yeah, M-. is broken, but at least C-M-x works. And ok, forget about calls-who, but that's pretty broken for me in CL anyway.

Scheme people often use Quack. It has excellent support for looking up documentation, as well as the usual stuff like interacting with the Scheme interpreter.

http://www.neilvandyke.org/quack/

If I have to tunnel my debug traffic over ssh, wouldn't it be easier to just ssh to the machine and run a local debugger?

[Sorry, only skimmed through video, but that wasn't explained in at least the first 10 minutes.]

Having the editor working locally might be a more responsive and "native" setup. I think this was intended more as a demo of possibilities though more than anything.

Slime allows you to code live on one machine while using another completely. Like Mac OS X controls better? fine, use a native Emacs and just tunnel to a remote Lisp session on NetBSD or Win32 :-)

It looks like it could be a video from Xerox PARC in 1968. Well integrated and useful and current and old and clunky - what steampunk would look like if it was software.

(Why didn't he ' '.join(map(char-to-morse, string))? He had to download a string split library?)

(DEFUN COINCIDENCE-THAT-CL-STANDS-FOR-BOTH-COMMON-LISP-AND-CAPS-LOCKP (...))

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