People mean different things by REPL - the nicer Lisps had richer reader prompts that were not totally text bsaed, could show you graphical stuff and accept commands other than just source code, have interactive features etc - see eg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Listener... or some youtube videos of Lisp machines.

That's getting to my point though - they should accommodate different workflows and use cases. But what's happening instead is that people are overusing notebooks in cases where plain text + REPL is more appropriate.

That makes sense as a possible situation. I’m just not sure that it’s one that’s familiar to me. I can’t honestly say I have my finger on the pulse of where people are using notebooks vs repls but the former seem really great for 1) step by step examples 2) scripts-in-progress where certain steps are more in flux than others.

Though, I think I get what you mean as I reflect on my own dev experience. As a mainly C# dev which has a very very limited repl experience (I would and should say no repl experience but someone will yell at me about csi.exe or dotnet-script) I have seen people using notebooks for want of a good repl, but I’m curious why anyone writing python would.