Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

You are right but let's put things in order: CL's REPL is outstandingly more interactive than Python's. Specially with Emacs & Slime (or the others coming close: Pulsar with SLIMA, vim, VSCode, Intellij, Sublime…) We have an interactive debugger, restarts, we can resume a failed computation from anywhere in the stack, we don't loose state, the Lisp program actually never restarts, we compile a function against a live image and get immediate feedback… (it's an internal and difficult explanation on forums)

However, neither the built-in SBCL terminal REPL nor Slime offer a shell pass-through or ipython-like commands. We add one (by using the Clesh library).

The doc doesn't mention it yet, we can enable the shell passthrough in Slime's REPL (or any other editor):

    CIEL-USER> (enable-shell-passthrough)


Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: