History of Lisp Editing

D-Edit was already around when I got to PARC in late 1983. The first thing I worked on was an Emacs in Interlisp-D.<p>I think ITS Emacs (written in TECO) had paren matching before the CADR Lisp machines (what you call Zmacs, but it was EINE originally).<p>The first Emacs written in Lisp was Multics Emacs (written by Bernie Greenberg) and it had paren matching when I used it but that was 81&#x2F;82 timeframe.<p>What do you call paren matching by the way? Emacs always had structure navigation (c-m-F&#x2F;B and c-m-U etc) in which case that support went back into the 1970s.<p>(BTW the first Emacs-like editor for the lispms was EINE (Eine Is Not Emacs); it was replaced by ZWEI (Zwei Was Eine Initially). Look at a German dictionary if that is not funny. IIRC Zmacs was a renaming by Symbolics as part of their efforts to move beyond the AI lab implementation (While LMI&#x2F;TI continued to sync back to the AI lab sources).

Teletype Lisp editor was really amazing experience. I got the idea I could do something similar to natural languages. Especially Finnish Language, which contains very long words, and the end of those words do not necessarily need to be printed out to aid comprehension. So chapters and paragraphs and sentences would be like S-expressions in Interlisp Editor, only first few words showing and first few letters printed out in worlds. Unfortunately this grand idea never came real, because they did not give me extra teletype time in 1974.

Hah, fun:<p>&gt; Debating Maclisp vs Interlisp (i.e. storing code as text vs structure)<p>This really puts &quot;tabs vs. spaces&quot; to shame.

I started to use paredit early in my Lisp career and never looked back. I tried smartparens but found it annoying (I find it much harder to change my tools these days).<p>Parinfer looks very clever, but I&#x27;m not afraid of &quot;hotkeys&quot; (I use emacs) and I don&#x27;t want to do manual indentation. Is there any benefit over paredit for me?

I don&#x27;t use paredit or similar extensions to code Lisp. Just bare Emacs (with SLIME, of course) is enough. The closing parens that I didn&#x27;t type are distracting. If there&#x27;s so much parentheses in your code that you&#x27;re tired of closing them, maybe it needs a refactoring?

I&#x27;d like to find out how people tolerate ()[]{};,. in their programming, in far greater quantities and in more complex interspersal than Lisp&#x27;s parens. )]];));}}};

&gt; I&#x27;d like to find out how people tolerated parens back in the golden days of Lisp.<p>Why is it so unimaginable that people can just live with all those parentheses? The only parenthesis-related fragment in my .emacs is the following:<p><pre><code> (keyboard-translate ?\( ?\[) (keyboard-translate ?\[ ?\() (keyboard-translate ?\) ?\]) (keyboard-translate ?\] ?\)) </code></pre> I guess all the listed approaches may make things easier once you get used to them, but I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;m not the only one writing parentheses one by one.

I incorporated parinfer into my reagent live coding environment here[1], and it&#x27;s been working pretty well.<p>I have also used Atom with Parinfer to teach a nontechnical designer the basics of clojure. Enough to build templates using hiccup for her resume, and personal website. I don&#x27;t think smartparens or paredit would be anywhere near as easy for her to pick up.<p>If you&#x27;re used to indentation being meaningful as some langs do, you should probably try out clojure&#x2F;script with parinfer.<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;escherize.com&#x2F;cljsfiddle" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;escherize.com&#x2F;cljsfiddle</a>

no expert at all; was before my time -<p>But probably worth spending some time with ITS, TOPS-10, and TOPS-20 &amp; digging around with TECO and its descendants which came to be emacs, and probably checking into 4.2&#x2F;4.3BSD as well..<p>The former group is pretty much the platform for early LISP (when lisp was still in caps :b ), and the latter, well, alot of good stuff happened here.. plus built in franz lisp and the lisp mode for (real) vi ..

Very interesting! paredit + agressive-indent made my life so much easier. Now I don&#x27;t have to worry about parens OR indentation. Unless you work with people who have different preferences of course, but for my own stuff I generally stopped trying to fight agressive-indent (at least it&#x27;s consistent).

kb-emacs should be on that list too, I would think