Its an amusing parody and I appreciate it. I don't actually think that Lisp and Smalltalk systems are the only possible examples of comprehensively interactive

Its an amusing parody and I appreciate it. I don't actually think that Lisp and Smalltalk systems are the only possible examples of comprehensively interactive development systems. I'd say FORTH systems qualify (though they lack a lot of creature comforts) and so does Factor. Probably some others I'm not thinking of, as well. I also don't think it's impossible to build a proper repl-driven development environment with other languages. I just think that the needed work hasn't been done for very many other languages, and for perfectly understandable reasons. One reason is that it's a lot of extra work to build a proper repl-driven environment. I mean, you have to do all the work that would be needed for a non-repl-driven environment, and then you have a bunch more work to do on top of that. A second reason is that in order to build such an environment you have to be sufficiently familiar with them to know why you would want one, and then you also need to be the sort of programmer who actually prefers to work that way (or else why would you bother with all that extra work?). And, finally, you have to have the time, ambition, and other resources needed to actually build the thing. So it should be no surprise that proper repl-driven environments are the exception rather than the rule, but I still prefer them, so I want more people to know about them, in hopes that some fraction of people will find them preferable, as I do, and the demand for them will grow, and that demand will help ensure that they don't disappear. They're how I prefer to work. I don't want to lose them.