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Comment by Derbasti | Hacker News Reader

This is something I always loved about Python (as compared to other languages): There are several awesome interpreters available for it!

This one has a curses-based interactive GUI for docs and autocompletion.

IPython has this awesome qtconsole that can show matplotlib plots inline with the code. Then there is its HTML notebook which is probably awesome for presenting stuff.

Even IDLE is pretty cool, actually.

Is stuff like this available for other programming languages? I know Matlab has something vaguely similar to IPython and I think the IPython notebook is inspired by mathematica?

In comparison IRB seems really boring to me. Does Ruby have a cool interpreter? Perl? R?

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> There are several awesome interpreters available for it!

Technically, it's not another interpreter (like IronPython or Jython), just an interface to the classic CPython REPL.

Most Lisps will integrate with Emacs out of the box as an "inferior lisp process" which supports something I think is more valuable: send code straight from an editor buffer to an embedded REPL. This completely removes the copy-and-paste step you have when working with a regular, detached REPL. One of the more impressive uses of this is with ClojureScript, which integrates the compiler with a bit of JS running in a browser to allow you to send Cljs code straight from your editor to the browser.

You can use SLIME with Common Lisp and Clojure which is similar but adds a number of features like hints, docs, and debugging, although it was originally designed for CL so Clojure support is less powerful.

There are definitely Emacs modes like this for other languages, and probably similar plugins or whatever for other editors.

> Does Ruby have a cool interpreter?

I don't know if it's cool, but I know of at least one alternative to irb: http://pry.github.com/

Pry is pretty cool. It adds some debugger-like features and editor integration, adds some convenient built-in commands, and improves on the UI in similar ways to bpython.

> Does Ruby have a cool interpreter? Perl? R?

For Perl I use Devel::REPL (https://metacpan.org/module/Devel::REPL) but there are several others on CPAN (for eg: https://metacpan.org/module/Zoidberg) with varying levels of coolness.

for R, you're a fool (IMO) if you use anything but Emacs with Emacs Speaks Statistics.

Even as an emacs die-hard (very), I have not found yet a reason to move from the bundled editor for Mac that comes with R

RStudio is a pretty cool IDE for R.

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