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Interesting perspective. I’ve never used a REPL much. I did a bit of commercial Python and rarely used it there and I built my career on PHP, which kinda has on
by codazoda 4y ago
Interesting perspective. I’ve never used a REPL much. I did a bit of commercial Python and rarely used it there and I built my career on PHP, which kinda has one, but not a very usable one. I found the REPL to be a distraction. I just want to write code in my favorite text editor and then interpret or compile it.
I’m a bit old school, I realize.
- bmitc 4y agoREPLs are awesome, but I have to admit that interactive notebooks are even awesome...r. For Elixir, I use its REPL called IEx frequently, but it can be cumbersome iterating on functions, especially since Elixir requires functions to be in modules and the REPL does not define a top-level module like some other languages' REPLs do. Although Elixir does allow one to recompile modules without having to restart IEx. But I have found that using Livebook, Elixir's interactive notebook application, is much more efficient for creating test code or prototyping modules. Then I can just copy and paste the module and/or functions back into my Elixir project. Livebook also allows you to attach Livebook to a Mix project. .NET Interactive, which is a polyglot notebook and supports F#, is what I use for F# development as well. I personally feel any modern language needs REPL and notebook support, of some kind. Notebook technology is pretty underutilized in my experience, particularly for learning and documentation.