Another language that’s great in that regard is Smalltalk/Pharo. It’s the Minecraft of programming languages. Your program start as an IDE and you morph it to what you want. Feels like building a car while it’s running.
Another language that’s great in that regard is Smalltalk/Pharo. It’s the Minecraft of programming languages. Your program start as an IDE and you morph it to what you want. Feels like building a car while it’s running.
Typically when one starts a Lisp development system, it will always start some kind of visible REPL. Either it runs it in a Terminal (most UNIX Lisps have a terminal REPL), runs it as a tool in its own GUI-based IDE (MCL, CCL, Allegro CL, LispWorks, Corman Lisp, ..., Symbolics Genera, CL + McCLIM) or runs the REPL frontend in a connected IDE (-> SLIME + GNU Emacs is a prominent IDE for CL, earlier this was done using subprocesses called "inferior Lisps" like in ILISP+GNU Emacs).
The conversational REPL interface (typing expressions, evaluating the expression and getting a response) is widely used.
Smalltalk has the "Workspace" or a Playground (-> Pharo) as similar tools.
What's misleading is touting the acronym "REPL", instead of touting why that's important. Everyone who's used to the weaker "REPLs" of other languages don't understand what the big deal is, because they think they already know, so it's important to move past the acronym when explaining its value.