funny that he didn't touch upon the REPL. for me, that's second only to macros. also for examples, just look at news.arc. the vars-form stuff, and the little t

funny that he didn't touch upon the REPL. for me, that's second only to macros. also for examples, just look at news.arc. the vars-form stuff, and the little template languages (trtd) etc ... is far superior than at least all of the django form and template stuff ... and it seems that it was not more than an afterthought; compare with the craziness of having a template language and the difficulty this sometimes presents. sure, adding a tag library in django is not the end of the world, but you can't beat the immediacy of arc's html macros (which you can find for CL on the ansi book). then add a REPL on top, and you are on another league of power and productivity. granted news was written by an expert, but i don't see the comparable power coming from django (and maybe rails) and it's safe to assume those guys know their python. we have the need to create lots of web forms quickly for work (lots and lots). we used django which was a god-send in this regard, but it was still too time consuming (think deployment, styling, SQL databases). so taking a hint from the html chapter in the ansi book we wrote a system in which you define fields within sections within pages to the point where even the non-programmers can now do it ie: (defpage page3) (defsection section-x) (definputfield blah :type text :section section-x :page page3) this is enough to put the field up and tie it into storage (it uses page.section.fieldname as key which could be an issue if you want to move stuff around). you can also do this in the (production) REPL, and the field will show up right away (with an exception if you dup something). we don't do major releases this way, but if a researcher wants something right away and he/she is a big shot then it has to be done now. well, there you go. it's done as fast as we can type it in. there's your example, and i'm sure there are more. try that with c++.