3 ms·

His "sketchbook" sounds an awful lot like a REPL to me.

• kaens 12y ago
  The difference here is that the code you wrote in the REPL dies with the REPL. A REPL is more of a "scratchpad", to stay in the family of metaphors being used. Scratchpads and sketchbooks serve similar purposes, but the latter generally is used for things intended to have a bit more permanence and also to be capable of re-visiting. In any case, I'm pretty sure the main point here is "you need to write a lot of varied code if you want to become an expert at software development".
  • dandrews 12y ago
    I was thinking along the lines of SLIME, where your evaluated code is preserved by the editor. Sorry for being unclear. Been a long time since I used a raw REPL.
    • lgas 12y ago
      That still goes away when you close emacs/slime. I think a sketchbook would be more like an ipython notebook or a mathematica page, etc.
    • kaens 12y ago
      There's still a useful distinction to be made -- the "sketchbook" talked about is the collection of stuff you've done over some longer period of time that you can look through / look back on. It's not a description of a tool, although as you noted the language used in the last paragraph of the post is very similar to the language people use to describe the use of a REPL. I'm a fellow emacs user, I use SLIME-like functionality practically every day. My "sketchbooks" are my ~/workspace folder and my github account. I have some older "sketchbooks" in the form of tarballs of my ~/workspace folders from old machines. I thought that basically everyone who wrote software had similar collections of little projects, finished and un-finished, until about a year ago when it came up in discussion with a few other devs who didn't.
• jchendy 12y ago
  > His "sketchbook" sounds an awful lot like a REPL to me. (self-promotion here) or perhaps a polyglot code notebook: http://beakernotebook.com/ http://beakernotebook.com/