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Sure. I think REPL-driven development is great for what I call exploratory programming. When you are playing around with ideas and want to quickly try out diffe
by mbrodersen 5y ago
Sure. I think REPL-driven development is great for what I call exploratory programming. When you are playing around with ideas and want to quickly try out different approaches and quickly test if a new function is working. However the code that I normally deal with are very large code bases where a lot of the code is not written by myself. And I find it a lot easier to navigate and build a mental model of where things are and how it works using an IDE. It simply works better for my brain but of course YMMV.
- mtrower 5y agoWhy not both? Are the two concepts somehow incompatible? A REPL is a (very) powerful tool for testing, probing, inspecting (etc) code; but it is only one tool. It should be a part of your IDE (if you go for such things), not replace it.
- mbrodersen 5y agoWouldn't it make more sense to automate the tests instead of doing it manually? I have 9000+ auto tests for the large complex C++ code base I am currently maintaining. And the result is zero customer production bugs in the last 5+ years. And I routinely refactor and rewrite large parts of the code without worrying about it.
- mtrower 5y agoYes, automated test suites are great! I don’t know that they need all the things some people stuff into them, but the idea is a useful one. If you take my comment in the context of REPL-driven development, it’s going to seem tangential at best. But you mentioned that you prefer IDEs over REPLs; I’m merely suggesting that the two need not be exclusive. Unless you’re advocating for TDD, in a strict sense?