The Runtime Is Excellent and Unreachable: Agent-Reachable REPLs Across the Lisp Family
Table of Contents
A draft for the proposal shelf. Not submitted anywhere. Status: New, from the review.
1. Pitch
Delimiter repair ports across Lisps almost unchanged. Live runtime access does not port at all.
2. Abstract
Clojure's advantage with coding agents is nREPL, not parentheses. Balancing
delimiters is a parsing problem and carries from dialect to dialect. Reaching
a live image is a protocol problem, and each Lisp solves it differently or not
at all. This talk shows what it took to give Guile the same thing with only
guile --listen and a logging proxy: every evaluation recorded in a
transcript a reviewer can read, the debugger and macro expander on the same
socket, and the experiments that failed on the way.
3. Audience, format, venue
- Audience
- Lisp implementers and users outside Clojure; Scheme and Emacs users.
- Format
- ELS lightning first; then a 20 to 30 minute talk or a Scheme Workshop experience report.
- Where
- European Lisp Symposium, the Scheme Workshop at ICFP, EmacsConf (the Geiser side).
4. Review
Second on the L7 shortlist and fourth on the presentation review's: the crowded agent-plus-REPL topic moved to a language where it is not crowded. The gap to close first: the Common Lisp row of the comparison says "ad-hoc" with no SWANK or SLY experiment behind it, and ELS is a Common Lisp room.