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I 100% agree with you and another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25622990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25622990 I spent years in Clojure

I 100% agree with you and another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25622990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25622990 I spent years in Clojure and found that writing code in the REPL just... isn't fun. This has been true for every interactive system I've ever used (including... the shell). The shell as a REPL for a succinct language is nice for interactive workflows, but for trying to build less ephemeral pieces of code, the editor is the first class citizen I care about. Sending code to a REPL to be interacted with? Cool, and I think this is what a lot of people mean when they say REPL-driven. I'd imagine convenience around that in a language or its tooling would be what convinces me to do more REPL-style things.

koz_ 6y ago
I think what people mean when they say REPL-driven is to have a headless REPL that one never actually interacts with directly, but rather sends it snippets of code for evaluation directly from one's editor. Typing code into a shell prompt is excruciating by comparison. I think this is a huge barrier of entry to languages like Clojure. The syntax and dynamic nature of the language really lend themselves to an extremely interactive and productive workflow, but that is a hard thing to communicate. It seems most people think that when Clojure programmers refer to the joy of the REPL they imagine writing code into Python or Ruby's REPLs (e.g. https://repl.it/languages/python3 https://repl.it/languages/python3), but that is about as far from what is meant as is possible. I mean, who would enjoy programming in an environment that deleted your work every time you finished a line of code?