Hi,methusala wrote: Since I'm somewhat rambling on about my idealized development environment, I may as well add that it seems to me that Lisp should have some kind of built in replacement for SQL also. Having this would get rid of another time waster in web app development, having to switch back and forth to the mysql command line.
I'd say that for a lot of projects SQL is a tad overkill (people commonly use what they know). Consider having a look at http://common-lisp.net/project/elephant/ and http://common-lisp.net/project/rucksack/; persistence libraries. They're both relatively easy to use (elephant has quite a few dependencies though; rucksack is written in mostly portable CL). And they're both relatively fast. They don't, however, come with any pre-built GUI's or fancy command-line tools (that I know of).
My two cents.