Inspiring a future Clojure editor with forgotten Lisp UX - Shaun Lebron

Shaun Lebron explores fifty years of Lisp editing history and forgotten structural editing innovations to inspire better Clojure editor designs.

The first editor for Lisp turns 50 years old this year-a teletype editor that sported crude operations for navigating, restructuring and printing expressions. Today, a majority of Clojure users employ an emacs setup that has more or less existed since the 80s. But there is an interesting history of innovations around Lisp editing that has largely been forgotten. We will highlight the most interesting innovations from our research of this 50 year history, so that we may aspire to continue the search for better Lisp editing experiences. We will also postulate why these interesting innovations never took hold, and how these reasons have inspired an ongoing experimental but practical plugin for Atom called Locus, that works in concert with Parinfer to make Clojure not only dead-simple to write, but immediately pleasant to read.