Development Epiphanies
Dare Obasanjo sings the praises of working with a REPL - comparing it favorably with C# using Visual Studio:
Working with Python was a joy. I especially loved programming with a REPL . If I had a question about what some code does, it's pretty easy to write a few one or two liners to figure it out. Contrast this with using Web searches, trawling through MSDN documentation or creating a full blown program just to test the out some ideas when using C# and Visual Studio. I felt a lot more productive even though all I was using was Emacs and a DOS prompt.
Now, how productive do you think you can be working with a REPL that comes with an IDE built in itself? Where you can save the state of your running system any time you want/need to?
You can give it a try anytime you want: the water is just fine on the Smalltalk side of the street.
Technorati Tags: dynamic languages, python, smalltalk, ruby
Comments
[Patrick Mueller] November 26, 2007 14:52:01.563
While not nearly as powerful as Smalltalk's "REPL" capabilities, a lot of folks don't realize Eclipse has this thing called "Scrapbook pages" as a core, built-in feature. It's quite REPL-ish. I think as REPL-ish as you could really get with Java. There's no wonder why that functionality is there, given the heritage of Eclipse.
I suspect that as .Net adopts more scripting into it's universe, you'll see things like a REPL built into VS, for the scripting languages that it actually supports (eventually): VB, Python, Ruby, etc.
Scrapbook
[Robin Barendregt] November 27, 2007 3:01:48.517
Actually, the scrapbook already existed in Eclipse's predecessor, VisualAge for Java, which was built on top of VisualAge for Smalltalk :-)