Lisp's simple syntax combines with an integrated editor to ease many of the common tasks of writing a Lisp program. Anyone who tries to tell you that "it's hard to balance parentheses in a Lisp program" is using the wrong editor.
Virtually every Lisp environment comes with its own Lisp-aware editor. The rare (usually free and minimalist) Lisp environment that doesn't provide its own editor can use Emacs, which has a mode for editing Lisp source code.
As you type a Lisp program for the first time, it's handy to see the matching parentheses at a glance. Most Lisp editors facilitate this by briefly highlighting the opening parenthesis for each close parenthesis that you type. Highlighting can take different forms, depending upon the implementation. Sometimes, the text insertion cursor jumps back to the opening parenthesis for a fraction of a second (and then returns to its proper position before inserting the next typed character.) Another common technique is to briefly display the opening parenthesis in a bold font or a different color. And some editors even draw an outline around the entire list. No matter how it's done, you can see at a glance how your closing parentheses match their opening counterparts, with not so much as a pause in your typing of the program.
Once you've entered the program, you can find matching parentheses by positioning the cursor to either the beginning or ending parenthesis, then typing a keystroke that will either flash or move the cursor to the matching parenthesis.
Parenthesis matching is important when you're entering or editing a program. When you're reading a Lisp program, proper indentation is important to give you visual cues as to the program structure. In fact, you should be able to hide the parentheses in a properly indented Lisp program and still understand the program.
Lisp editors typically supply proper indentation as you type a new program; with some editors this is done automatically, while others require that you use a different keystroke in place of the return key to end a line. Together with parenthesis matching, automatic indentation lets you type a properly parenthesized and indented Lisp program without ever having to count parentheses or spaces.
When you edit an existing Lisp program, you'll often add or remove portions such that the proper indentation of the rest of the program must change. If you had to readjust everything by hand, you'd become quickly disenchanted with Lisp. That's why Lisp editors give you a way to reindent a program either a line at a time, or for an entire Lisp form. Lisp programmers tend to develop a habit of finishing small changes with the keystroke to reindent the portion of the program being edited; this gives the programmer immediate visual feedback on the updated structure of the program, as expressed by its indentation.
Lisp programmers tend not to abbreviate names. The short, mnemonic names in Common Lisp are there for historical reasons; the newer additions to Lisp have fully spelled out, descriptive names. Fortunately, a good Lisp program editor can save you a lot of typing by providing a symbol completion facility.
Symbol completion works like this. As you type your program, you're using names that are both built into the Lisp system and defined anew by your program. As you type a name, you can press a symbol-completions keystroke anytime after having typed the first few characters. If the typed prefix uniquely matches some symbol already known to the Lisp environment (either because it's built in, or because you've previously typed the whole name), the editor will type the rest of the symbol for you. If the typed prefix matches more than one completion, the editor may either pick the first and let you cycle through the rest by repeating the completion keystroke, or it may present a list of possible completions from which you can choose. In any case, it's important to note that symbol completion does not depend upon having compiled your program; completion works even during initial program entry.
As you develop your program, you'll often find that it's helpful to refer to a function that you've defined earlier; perhaps you need to see the source code to confirm that it will respond appropriately to unexpected inputs, or maybe you need to see how some vendor-supplied function is implemented. Lisp editors support this kind of exploration with yet another keystroke; just position the cursor somewhere in a name, press a key, and (if the definition is accessible in source form) you're instantly shown a view of the defining source code.
Despite its underlying simplicity, Lisp is a large language. The formal ANSI specification fills some 1,500 pages of paper describing the language and 978 predefined symbols. On top of that, your vendor's development environment will define hundreds of thousands of additional symbols. And, of course, your program will only add to the roster of symbol names.
Most Lisp editors will let you access documentation in various forms. For built-in and user-defined code, the editor should give you quick access to the documentation string and argument list. In fact, many Lisp editors automatically find and inobtrusively display the argument list whenever you type a space following a function or macro name. A quick glance at the argument list helps you avoid usage mistakes.
Hypertext access to online manuals is becoming increasingly popular. Some Lisp editors will support lookups in one or more manuals (including the Lisp reference) in a manner similar to the way they support access to documentation strings.
The editor (or the Lisp environment in general if the environment is not editor-centric) should support easy access to debugging tools such as browsers, trace and step facilities, backtraces, inspectors, and program databases such as apropos, who-calls, and callers-of (see Chapters 10, 16, and 22).
The editor in many Lisp development environments is itself written in Lisp. The vendor should document the external APIs of the editor and supply source code; then you can add your own extensions to the editor and customize your Lisp environment to fit the way that you work.