[epiccoleman]

The Elixir REPL is world-class, and I agree that it's a truly killer feature of the language. I miss it terribly when I write stuff in other languages (i.e. any time I'm coding, you know, for money).

Having a good REPL just removes so much of the friction you normally have to contend with in programming. You can build up ideas piecewise and test things as you go, instead of having to make guesses and run the whole damn app just to poke some troublesome piece of code. The Elixir standard library is great, and it's extremely easy to access the docs via the REPL, which I find really helps me stay in the flow. When I'm coding in Elixir, popping over to a browser window to search small questions is pretty rare, because I can usually find the answer without leaving the REPL. This also encourages me to write good docstrings for my own code!

But it gets even better, because you can run the REPL while also running your code. I mentioned above having to "run the whole app to poke a piece of code" - when you find yourself needing to run the app, you're welcome to, and you can manipulate live data (in dev, of course ;) ) and inspect what's going on in ways that you either can't do or need a debugger for in other stacks. And now, with the introduction of some typing facilities, I expect the tools to get even better.

Then there's all the fun and power of the functional paradigm while still having extremely robust ways to deal with mutability and state, and not having to deal with the syntax of LISP (sorry LISP). It's a language that just hits every note for me, I'm a huge fan.

[barrell]

Recently moved my python app over to Elixir, and currently gushing over Elixir every day. I'm a huge fan and have loved everything about it, except...

Comping from a LISP, the Elixir REPL really is not world-class. It's a really far, distant second. It's nice, I enjoy it more than python's personally, and more than what I remember from irb back in the day -- but nothing beats the integration of structural editing and nREPLs.

LISP doesn't have to be for you, but there's still a lot to learn from that REPL experience if the Elixir community wants to grow ;)

[epiccoleman]

Yeah, I considered adding a caveat to my post. The LISP repl experience is of course the real gold standard (especially when you've got good editor integration, like the various Emacs packages).

I love LISP in general - was a big Clojure fan for a while - but I feel like Elixir threads the needle of usability much better for me.

Anyway, I'll stand by my claim - Elixir's REPL is leaps and bounds better than Python's, and better than irb and pry by some smaller amount. It's a pleasure to use. I would love to see a world where I can send expressions for evaluation to the REPL as easily as you can with LISP. Maybe we'll get there someday!