Comment by mepian
16 hours ago
There is an explanation in the blog: https://coalton-lang.github.io/20260424-mine/
> However, the above is a tall order for someone just wanting to dip their toes in, to see if they have any interest in Coalton or Common Lisp. A couple hours on the weekend is easily sunk into getting configurations right, and the right subsystems installed, and the right paths setup, just so the first line of code can be executed.
> mine is not Emacs. It aims to eliminate all of that, and be a Coalton/Lisp-first development environment, whose only job is to be a Coalton/Lisp-first development environment. But more than that, it needs to be accessible. A non-programmer should find it easy to download, install, and run mine with nothing more than a download link.
> mine is not Emacs.
Ah… yes, okay, I see what they did there… chuckle, sigh. Well, it's arguably in the same grand cultural tradition as EINE and ZWEI at least!
I vaguely remember that there was also TRES. EINE = Eine Is Not Emacs
ZWEI = Zwei Was Eine Initially
TRES = Tres Replaces Eine’s Successor
DREI = DREI Replaces EINE's Inheritor
https://mcclim.common-lisp.dev/static/documents/drei.pdf
Why would a non-programmer want to download, install and run a CL IDE?
1. It is a potential first step on the way from non-programmer to programmer.
2. "Easy enough for a non-programmer" may also say something about how easy it is for a programmer.
I think the number of non-programmers who think 'I want to learn to program; I'll start with common lisp but emacs is too difficult!' is so small it is not a group worth considering. It's probably MIT & Stanford undergrads?
It's their IDE and they can design it how they want, but that's a weird goal for a CL IDE.
2 replies →