My relatively amateur take is that the REPL and the debugging experience seem powerful. I would like to know how they compete with other languages. The REPL is

My relatively amateur take is that the REPL and the debugging experience seem powerful. I would like to know how they compete with other languages. The REPL is the center of everything and it enables you to change functions on a running program. Tracing a function (shows function arguments on every call) is a simple as calling trace(function-name). If a program crashes, it does not really crash... it enters some debug mode which offers possible resolutions, including change the function that failed. The REPL can trivially show you the assembly code of individual functions. You can also add declarations for each function with hints for the compiler (and then check the size of the resulting assembly). I believe this series of articles highlights some of the debugging features. https://malisper.me/debugging-lisp-part-1-recompilation/ https://malisper.me/debugging-lisp-part-1-recompilation/ There is also a story called "debugging code from 60 million miles away". Other things that I did not manage to explore yet are the macros, which allows you to create your own domain specific languages. My general impression so far is that it is a really powerful language, for lonely hackers. :)