4 ms·
Never underestimate the edit-compile-test loop. It has an huge impact on productivity.
by ekr 10y ago
Never underestimate the edit-compile-test loop. It has an huge impact on productivity.
- aninhumer 10y agoWell with stronger type guarantees, a lot of the "test" part of that loop gets pushed into "compile". Indeed the core loop becomes edit-typecheck, and while the compiler can be slow, the type checker tends to be a lot faster than the test suite.
- arunc 10y agoAKA, REPL: Read Evaluate Print Loop.
- majewsky 10y agoNo, a REPL is an interactive program, whereas the ECT loop belongs to the workflow of programming.
- pjmlp 10y agoSo how would you describe the experience of languages that offer both a REPL and also have integrated toolchains for AOT compilation to native code?
- sgift 10y agoNice. I would describe the experience (and the languages) as nice. And respectful of my time.* * Waiting patiently for my JDK9 JShell
- krylon 10y agoThere used to be a program called BeanShell that tried to provide a REPL for Java, but it was not as nice as the REPLs offered by, e.g. Python or Ruby (Let alone Lisps where the debugger is integrated into the REPL). OTOH, I looked at it years ago, so maybe it has gotten better (or it stagnated completely).
- joshmarlow 10y agoOCaml offers a great REPL-experience in the form of `coretop`. It's got auto-complete that makes exploration awesome/easy. It feels very much like IPython. OCaml installations tend to come with both a native compiler and a byte-code compiler/runtime, so you really get the best of both worlds there - minus some occasional hiccups in the build process.
- pjmlp 10y agoOCaml was one of the languages I had in mind when I made the remark. :)
- moron4hire 10y agoA REPL is just an ECT loop speed up enough to be actually good.
- amelius 10y agoCan we have the best of both worlds?
- openasocket 10y agoThe biggest win for that is going to be incremental compilation. I can't wait for that to stabilize.