[vrgfa]

Agreed. I dislike all REPLs except maybe the Lisp one. In SML, OCaml, F# they are less useful anyway since the strength of these languages is to build up huge (but sound) abstractions.

I think the fascination with REPLs, especially in the Python world, is that it allows one to produce flashy web page snippets or Jupiter notebooks that look like work while they are really trivial (there is a similarity here to pg's remark that Java is partly popular because the boilerplate looks like work).