My concept of a "REPL" is mostly defined by emacs. You would have a buffer with a code file, with an active jupyter kernel with the correct dependencies loaded in it. Then one would send any active region with `C-c C-c` and get timely feedback.

With this mode https://github.com/nnicandro/emacs-jupyter one can connect to a jupyter kernel running locally or remote (would mostly prefer SSH port forwarding or kubectl port-forward the remote jupyter server). It makes life so much easier to interact with cloud environment (e.g. spark).