Hypothesis: the best environments for interactive and incremental development must have semantics that are independent of the order in which code is written. This is true of Excel, largely true of Smalltalk, but not of Lisps or the various scripting language + notebook systems.
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Replying to @avibryant
hm... I always thought one of the great features of Common Lisp is that you can enter a program's expressions in pretty much any order (e.g. you can create a subclass of a class that doesn't even exist yet)
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Replying to @msimoni
interesting, maybe I have to revise my opinion of CL. Is it fair to represent a CL program as an unordered set of top-level forms, then? What happens if, eg, you try to use a macro that hasn't been defined yet, or redefine a macro after you've used it?
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CL has a partial order between forms, that isn't particularly amenable to static analysis, though Matt Steele did write a post facto dependency tracker using SBCL's code coverage support. Dependencies include macro definitions and compile time side effects.
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