Comment by nchubrich

Amazing----I've dreamed of having something like this ever since I started programming. Can't wait to try it out.

Mind if I share a couple ideas that might not be hard to implement with what you've got?

1) It would be nice to see \aggregate information about what has happened in function calls. The simplest would be: while the code is running, put and update a bar graph next to each function to show, proportionally to others, how many times it has been called so far.

2) More generally: record and associate with a function \all the inputs and outputs it has had. (Other commenters talked about having "context"). Then the programmer can scroll through these lists, calculate statistics for them if they are numbers, or choose one of them to plug into the function. (Often when you are refactoring code, some function lower in the code path gets 'orphaned'----it took some kind of complex input you don't want to bother putting in by hand, and so now if you want to modify it you're deterred. If you had prior inputs, you could just 'wire it up' with one of those.)

3) Commenters talked about having different fonts. I think the \one area where this would be helpful in Lisp is with the parentheses. I've shared prior versions of this idea before, but what I think would be helpful is to vary both \color and \size of parentheses. You pick three or four colors, say red, blue, and black (more than that is hard to tell apart in context, especially with syntax coloring), and once you've varied that, you bump the size up. So if you had seven parentheses in sequence, there would be three sizes, with the outermost three the largest, the next three medium, etc.