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I still don't understand what is about REPL that lisp people find particularly useful. Do you recommend any resources explaining the workflow?

• bandrami 29d ago
  It's the same reason people like symbolic debuggers: you can run your program as many lines at a time as you want and stop and inspect the state whenever you need to. I haven't really used jupyter but I understand the workflow there is very similar.
• norman784 29d ago
  Not only Lisp, but Javascript and Ruby (AKA dynamic languages) devs also rely heavily in REPLs, for me at least the reason is that you don't know what value a variable holts, so you need to inspect them somehow, with typed languages you have less reasons to reach such tool.
  • bandrami 29d ago
    iPython was famous for a while but I think its popularity has waned, but yes as you point out really any dynamic language can do a repl; it's just that it's mostly the lisp/scheme and forth families that have leaned so heavily into the idea.
    • Bjartr 28d ago
      Not only dynamic languages! Java has `jshell` for instance
• deleted 29d ago
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