| > I've been using Lisp for more than 20 years and I don't agree. A repl is nice, and I use one often, but it does have tradeoffs. Me neither, and I also carry decent Lisp cred. I know what I'm doing to the extent that I can write a bunch of code in a file, and have it work, more or less. If I experiment with changes to code, I want to see the diff (as in git diff). Actually developing in a REPL seems very scatter-brained; you don't know what you're running since you've been mutating things left and right. Those that develop in a REPL actually develop in some kind of text editor which sends expressions to the REPL; that's what allows them to save the code properly to a file. Problem is, you now have three versions of the code to keep straight: editor, file and image. Okay, so you have massaged things into working. Well, which is the code that is working? Obviously, the code that is in the image. But of the textual codes does it correspond to? If you just save the content of every edit buffer to disk, is the code on disk exactly that code that is working in the image? Even if I have to work with a running image (say there is a lot of state that is difficult to reproduce from a clean start), I'm still going to work with some files, which I will edit and completely save to disk, and load all together as a unit into the running image, instead of evaluating individual expressions out of an edit buffer. |