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From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Is Ada the future? [was: Is C++ the future?]
Date: 11 Oct 1994 09:37:26 -0400
Organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
Message-ID: <37e4em$klf@gnat.cs.nyu.edu>
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Date: 1994-10-11T09:37:26-04:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

OK Richard, you are right, it isn't LISP that likes debuggers. That for me was
a shorthand for "typical LISP programmers", or "the spirit of LISP" or
somesuch.

I think the reason that highly dynamic languages tend to like to use
debuggers (in the same general sense as para 1 above :-) is that almost
all error detection is put off till runtime, and so the normal style is
throw code together, try to run it, and then remove the bugs. Second it
is easy to change code on the fly from within the debugger in LISP, so
one gets to a point where the debugger is not merely a debugger but
essentially a programming environment.

I am not saying this is good, and I am not saying this is the only way to
program Lisp. I am just observing what from what I see and hear around me
seems to be the most typical usage patterns.