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Interesting that you put Lisp in difficult category despite the IDE experience being in another league compared to any other language I've tried.


The IDE experience with Lisp is great because of the interactivity, not because its great analysis. You do get good analysis from the language introspection capabilities itself, but you need to "manually" use that... It's just different. I know SLIME and love it, but the analysis it's capable of doing is not near the level you get with IntelliJ and Java or Kotlin. For starter, Common Lisp (and most other Lisps) don't even have static types (I know you can declare types, but most libs don't do it and SLIME doesn't use that for any IDE feature as far as I know, other than perhaps warn when you use an obviously wrong argument type), making features like advanced refactoring very difficult. Macros make it very hard to even know whether the syntax is right (try writing a LOOP in Common Lisp - SLIME won't help you).


I'm not a Common Lisp expert, but so far, I dislike the LOOP macro specifically because of its complex syntax compared to other Lisp macros and constructs.

The DO macro is complex, but I'm pretty sure Emacs will write something like this at the bottom of your screen if you have ElDoc enabled. (I'm not at my computer right now, so this is just me writing from memory).

  (do ((var init step)...) (condition value) &body)
You're right that this isn't as good as actual autocomplete like in IDEs, though.




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