Comment by lispm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lispm | Hacker News Reader

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Maybe it's because you sound like you detected new and unique (!) stuff or that it is actually like you describe. For example:

> Jupyter presents a unique programming style

UNIQUE (!)

> But the difference between Jupyter and a REPL is that Jupyter is persistent. Code which I write in a REPL disappears along with my data when the REPL exits, but Jupyter notebooks hang around.

Sounds like a typical Mathematica notebook to me.

Macsyma (a Computer Algebra system written in Lisp) has had also Notebooks like that: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/macsyma/docs/intro...

REPLs on Lisp systems have been persistent in Lisp images (not in notebook files and not transferable) since a very long time and some display text/graphics inline.

I'll grant "unique" is not an ideal world choice. I meant it not as much as "you literally can't find this anywhere else" so much as "it's something you don't find much these days."

And I think it's a little uncharitable to think I was claiming that wholesale, since I explicitly reference other implementations of the same idea at the end.

> it's something you don't find much these days

This is approach is available with all of the JVM languages too. Putting that with what others have noted about the CLR, C, and LISP implementations, this may be more common than rare.

https://zeroturnaround.com/rebellabs/reloading_java_classes_...

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/2018.1/debugger-hotswap....

It may not be so much the case the people are being uncharitable as that there really isn't much that is new or unique in software.

For my own part, I have hit that wall so many times that I now begin with the assumption "if I can imagine how it might work, someone has probably already done it".

That is actually nice in the sense that I nearly always have a starting foundation when solving problems these days but also frustrating to the point of cynicism when discoveries or inventions I put a lot of time in to turn out to be minor variations on something 1k+ people already knew about.

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