3 ms·

Yes, exactly. It's perhaps my fault for not making this more explicit in the essay, but the "repl" in "repl-driven programming" does not mean the repl window.

O_H_E 6y ago
Yeah, I suggest you expand upon that, or perhaps another article showing that "conversation". Unfortunately, some people - including me - have only used a repl in "one-direction" and have to copy stuff back and forth.
- mikelevins 6y ago
  That's a good suggestion. Walking through a set of interactions is a solid idea. For what it's worth, there are some videos around of people actually doing it with Lisp and Smalltalk systems, and pjmlp already posted a pile of them elsewhere in this thread. I can add a few more: Kalman Reti walking through some interactions with a Symbolics LispM repl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk Brian Mastenbrook demonstrating Interlisp's SEDIT structure editor in the Xerox Lisp environment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qsmF8HHskg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qsmF8HHskg Rainer Joswig (lispm here on HN) showing us a little bit of repl and Zmacs interaction on a Symbolics Lisp Machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIGt5OwkoMA&list=PLN1hNlVqKBbN6c4BbDuGL3VfrRNOuLsgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIGt5OwkoMA&list=PLN1hNlVqKB... Rainer again, showing some simple interactions with Macintosh Common Lisp, which was my daily driver for years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKG8cJl70mo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKG8cJl70mo Ruby programmer Avdi Grimm shows some things that he found cool about Pharo Smalltalk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOuZyOKa91o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOuZyOKa91o Dan Ingalls (one of the original authors of Smalltalk) in a 2017 demo of Smalltalk 76: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqKyHEJe9_w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqKyHEJe9_w There are some other things I'd like to find for lists like this, but haven't been able to. In particular, a good demo of Apple's SK8 would be great. If you can imagine a full-color Hypercard that could crack open and reprogram absolutely everything on the screen, including the machine code that drew the window system's widgets, all in a repl while the code was live; in which you could grab an arbitrary widget and drop it on the repl window to get a live variable reference to the widget, and then inspect it, operate on it, and reprogram it, again, while everything continued to run; in which you could build new window-system widgets by snapping together shapes and telling them to become widgets; in which you were not limited to HyperTalk for coding and text strings for data, but had a full Common Lisp at your disposal plus a Minsky-style frame system for representing data and knowledge, then you have some idea of what SK8 was like.

O_H_E 6y ago

Yeah, I suggest you expand upon that, or perhaps another article showing that "conversation". Unfortunately, some people - including me - have only used a repl in "one-direction" and have to copy stuff back and forth.

mikelevins 6y ago
That's a good suggestion. Walking through a set of interactions is a solid idea. For what it's worth, there are some videos around of people actually doing it with Lisp and Smalltalk systems, and pjmlp already posted a pile of them elsewhere in this thread. I can add a few more: Kalman Reti walking through some interactions with a Symbolics LispM repl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk Brian Mastenbrook demonstrating Interlisp's SEDIT structure editor in the Xerox Lisp environment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qsmF8HHskg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qsmF8HHskg Rainer Joswig (lispm here on HN) showing us a little bit of repl and Zmacs interaction on a Symbolics Lisp Machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIGt5OwkoMA&list=PLN1hNlVqKBbN6c4BbDuGL3VfrRNOuLsgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIGt5OwkoMA&list=PLN1hNlVqKB... Rainer again, showing some simple interactions with Macintosh Common Lisp, which was my daily driver for years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKG8cJl70mo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKG8cJl70mo Ruby programmer Avdi Grimm shows some things that he found cool about Pharo Smalltalk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOuZyOKa91o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOuZyOKa91o Dan Ingalls (one of the original authors of Smalltalk) in a 2017 demo of Smalltalk 76: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqKyHEJe9_w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqKyHEJe9_w There are some other things I'd like to find for lists like this, but haven't been able to. In particular, a good demo of Apple's SK8 would be great. If you can imagine a full-color Hypercard that could crack open and reprogram absolutely everything on the screen, including the machine code that drew the window system's widgets, all in a repl while the code was live; in which you could grab an arbitrary widget and drop it on the repl window to get a live variable reference to the widget, and then inspect it, operate on it, and reprogram it, again, while everything continued to run; in which you could build new window-system widgets by snapping together shapes and telling them to become widgets; in which you were not limited to HyperTalk for coding and text strings for data, but had a full Common Lisp at your disposal plus a Minsky-style frame system for representing data and knowledge, then you have some idea of what SK8 was like.