From: SonOfLilit <sonoflilit@...>
Date: 2007-01-24T18:31:17+09:00
Subject: REPL driven programming

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Hello,

this is a spawn of "ruby text editor for beginner", in essence, because that
thread inspired the question in me.

LISP has SLIME.

With SLIME, alternating between REPL and source code files is trivial - you
have a shortcut to send a s-exp from one to the other and it all works great
together.

I wondered if that kind of programming style is supported in other
languages.

So I googled. I found many bloggers hail "repl-driven software development"
as a better-than-yours style that everyone should know or they are COBOL
monkeys, but nobody really explained what "REPL-driven software development"
is.

From a bit of work with SLIME (and screencasts of others using it), I
understand how some automation makes it really easy to play with your code
while working on it (it's supposed to be a Smalltalk thing, too, but I find
the tools very non-productive - at least in squeak - with there being no
easy way to navigate the code with the keyboard and hop to the correct
places and the mouse is a must for almost every operation) but I don't see
how a REPL alone makes it possible. Some more automation, in my opinion, is
needed - an interface that supports alternating file and REPL easily and
gives you a full IDE (code completion, macros) that is consistent in both.

Am I wrong?

If I'm correct, do such tools exist for other languages?

Either way, could anyone who uses the REPL for more than experimentation
with APIs elaborate on the way they use it to assist in their programming?
This really interests me, and I'm sure others could learn a lot from it.

Aur Saraf

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