You can certainly do something similar with other languages under the right constraints. For example you can fire up a copy of your application from the command

You can certainly do something similar with other languages under the right constraints. For example you can fire up a copy of your application from the command line (or from within Emacs using IPython mode for example). The difference is that you're not connecting to the same instance as the web server so for example you can't change in memory constructs. But for an applications that uses a database for data storage you can certainly accomplish similar things.