Agreed. I always call them “consoles,” since I work largely in JS and that’s what the browser calls it. There’s no way in a console to jump into a module and modify a single function without resetting any state that the module was tracking.
I think that's neither typical in the history of Lisp nor in other languages. For example in Mathematica and Jupyter one interacts via a Notebook interface. Smalltalk interacts via an integrated IDE. Many editors connect via LSP to language servers.
In Lisp the idea of an editor connecting to a Lisp is a bit of a historic accident. After the AI winter the Lisp development environments were no longer used.
A typical way to start Lisp from an external editor was via the editor starting a subprocess (the "inferior Lisp") and talking to it. GNU Emacs did that with IDEs for Lisp, like ILISP.
The next generation used GNU Emacs as its external development environment (instead of developing a new one in Lisp) via a network interface. SLIME was the most important one, with SWANK being the component loaded into the external Lisp, which provided a server interface.
Unfortunately the SLIME REPL itself (its read eval print loop) is not great (in general SLIME is okay to use) and other languages sadly copied the SLIME model, failing to copy various other important REPL features of Lisp. For example Clojure lacked the error handling of Lisp REPLs, which typically provide features like break loops, where one can inspect and repair errors. SLIME goes directly into a backtrace window. Thus people copied it, without knowing that there is a tradition of completely different REPL interaction. GNU Emacs is bad at multitasking, thus one REPL buffer could block the editor for a while -> multiple REPL windows were not that useful. Another way of working got lost...
> Another way of working got lost...
You singled out SLIME, but you've mentioned before that you use LispWorks - do you think it's also "not great"? Just curious ...
Especially the REPL of SLIME / GNU Emacs.
LispWorks provides a better REPL experience.
I'm faster and more in the flow with the LispWorks IDE.
In fact, I think it's confusing to call the repls of language like Ruby, Java, JavaScript et al "REPL" at all, compared to what lisps offer, as the experience is so different. They're more like "Code evaluators" than anything else.
Typically when using repls outside of lisps, you'd type your code into the actual repl window, while in lisp-land you typically connect your editor to the repl and program like usual, selecting stuff to evaluate and so on.