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Re:Two years of Rust by zzalpha on Monday May 15, 2017 @09:38PM (#14346762)
or rather, a language runtime that enforced some level of introspect-ability on everything

And now we get to the real meat of it.

It's not a REPL you want.

It's reflection.

It just so happens that the latter is frequently paired with the former.

And I agree, that feature, which separates C#, Java, Ruby, Perl, Python, etc, from legacy languages like C make them significantly easier to use as a developer as the compiler, debugger, and IDE can do a much better job.

But as a feature it's orthogonal to a REPL.

Re:Two years of Rust by derefr on Monday May 15, 2017 @10:09PM (#14346869)
Reflection isn't orthogonal to a REPL; it's synergistic with a REPL. When you have a static language, yes, REPLs don't add much; reflection by itself is all you need and an IDE will suit you fine.

But when you are working in a language with runtime code generation—one where objects can build themselves new runtime-native function handles in response to messages—then a REPL will be able to do things for you that an IDE cannot†.

A REPL in a dynamic language (that takes advantage of its dynamicity) can be used to "explore" down CORBA/DBUS object trees; or fluently walk REST or SOAP endpoints without needing pre-baked WSDL descriptors to guide you to them. Heck, an Erlang REPL can hot-upgrade remote nodes. :)

† Or, at least, not a traditional IDE. You would need an IDE connected to a "live session" of your project—essentially a hybrid IDE-REPL. (Examples: Light Table; Emacs' CIDER extension for Clojure.)

Re:Two years of Rust by pjmlp on Tuesday May 16, 2017 @08:02AM (#14348884)
Lisp, Smalltalk and Mesa XDE at Xerox PARC are the genesis of what an IDE is supposed to be.

Two dynamic and one static languages.