Re: What's so great about lisp?

Jon Harrop <usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> I am particularly keen to avoid deciphering stack traces whenever possible.
> That takes a long time and requires me to write a lot more code so I am
> willing to go to some lengths to detect errors at compile time.

That dichotomy seems bogus to me -- why would a good implementation of a
dynamic language force you to expend effort to decipher stack traces and write
lots of extra code?

What's so bad with ending up in a nice interactive debugger in which moving up
and down the frames etc. displays the corresponding source code in your editor
and where you can ideally see the state of all relevant variables at a glance?
You should be able to investigate the error conveniently and test hypothesises
directly by entering code -- possibly even fix the problem on the fly -- and
in many cases this seems rather preferable to me to having to figure out in a
largely unassisted fashion were some non-obvious compile time type error came
from.

'as
.