Re:Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?
by jampekka on Monday February 15, 2021 @02:18AM
(#26140031)
I probably haven't. But I have seen quite a bit of irresponsible REPL development.
What I don't see is the benefit of the REPL. I effectively use my editor and the shell as a "REPL", but instead prefer to have the code in a program structure all the time. This means I don't have to have extra discipline for not accidentally polluting the state. Plus I can use version control, which means I can quite easily try out quite deep changes and still revert back to any state I had before. This is difficult with REPL. And with this workflow I don't have to do any extra "graduating" step; the code usually cleans up during the process.
A big additional benefit is that I can use the shell. I can e.g. pipe stuff from other programs, and I make a CLI for the program on the fly.
The main problem perhaps is when there are some longer computations, as there often are in analyses. For these I prefer memoization to the disk. The usual way to do this across REPL-sessions is to write ad-hoc temporary result files. This gets hairy really fast when you have to update these when the codepath before the dumps change.
I don't see much benefits of REPL over my workflow. Maybe some completions are nicer in REPL and you may get a bit nicer formatted output, but these are quite trivial. Perhaps people who are not accustomed to shell think that REPL is the only way to "rapidly iterate"?
What I don't see is the benefit of the REPL. I effectively use my editor and the shell as a "REPL", but instead prefer to have the code in a program structure all the time. This means I don't have to have extra discipline for not accidentally polluting the state. Plus I can use version control, which means I can quite easily try out quite deep changes and still revert back to any state I had before. This is difficult with REPL. And with this workflow I don't have to do any extra "graduating" step; the code usually cleans up during the process.
A big additional benefit is that I can use the shell. I can e.g. pipe stuff from other programs, and I make a CLI for the program on the fly.
The main problem perhaps is when there are some longer computations, as there often are in analyses. For these I prefer memoization to the disk. The usual way to do this across REPL-sessions is to write ad-hoc temporary result files. This gets hairy really fast when you have to update these when the codepath before the dumps change.
I don't see much benefits of REPL over my workflow. Maybe some completions are nicer in REPL and you may get a bit nicer formatted output, but these are quite trivial. Perhaps people who are not accustomed to shell think that REPL is the only way to "rapidly iterate"?