> Why are we stuck with blindly editing text files It's inherently more portable and composable. > waiting for compilation There are many languages that are

> Why are we stuck with blindly editing text files It's inherently more portable and composable. > waiting for compilation There are many languages that are interpreted that are mainstream. > that restarts the whole world You can program in mainstream languages without restarting the world. See skewer-mode[1] for example, for programming in javascript without restarting/refreshing. You can change top-level definitions and send them to override the previous definitions. You can do this with any language that allows overriding functions at runtime, IOW late-binding languages with an eval function, like python and ruby. This way of programming is probably very non-mainstream, though. The reason why it's not more popular is probably because most of us are working with programs that take little to no time to restart and get to the same state. Restarting ensures that whatever state we see in the program is reachable with the current state of the source code. > Why state of the art is a REPL where immediate feedback is limited to printed text with all the actual values barely reachable? Again, because that's inherently more portable and composable. What do you mean they "actual values [are] barely reachable"? You can access anything via any REPL I can think of. [1] https://github.com/skeeto/skewer-mode https://github.com/skeeto/skewer-mode