Modern Common Lisp systems include a wide variety of development tools that are tightly integrated into the environment. Lisp programmers take for granted tools like steppers, inspectors, debuggers, class browsers and graphers, syntax-aware editors, online documentation, command and symbol completion, profilers, tracers, and program analysis databases.

Interpreted language

Lisp is conceptually an interpreted language allowing for immediate execution of code changes without having to go through a lengthy compile-and-link process. Nevertheless, Lisp development environments provide incremental compilers allowing to achieve very good performance.