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> The problem with REPL-driven development is that when taken too far it makes you capable of creating programs that simply cannot be understood by someone with
by jlg23 5y ago
> The problem with REPL-driven development is that when taken too far it makes you capable of creating programs that simply cannot be understood by someone without the "lived experience" of the path taken to arrive the solution in the REPL.
Can you provide an example for this? Intuitively I'd say you are right, but, OTOH, even after 20 years of CL-hacking (which probably does more REPL-driven development than any other language), I cannot come up with an example...
- randomswede 5y agoI have, once or twice, ended up in a position where "code saved in file" would load perfectly fine in my hacked-in image, but fail to load (or compile) in a fresh image. This is (usually) a sign that I forgot one function or macro in the code-on-disk, that I hand-chased in the REPL. In neither case was it hard to rectify, but it did leave me a bit confused. And very thankful that I had not quit the main dev image. After that, I have explicitly added "add a test suite, run test suite in fresh image" as a technique to keep that from persisting for a long time. And simply doing that seems to keep me subconsciously aware of the problem and not making it appear in the first place.