I learned on C/C++, followed by Java, then PHP... I didn't even know what a REPL was until I started working with Python. Now it's just painful not to have one.

Which is not to say that every language can or should have one, but it's not hard to see how people who come from a background where that's normal could look at this and say "good holy mother of spaghetti, how on earth do these savages operate?"