Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

The only time I've ever needed a REPL is if I'm working with a badly architected codebase such that I don't know the shapes of my inputs. It's otherwise pretty easy to reason about well-architected code without needing to run it.


A lot of Lisp development is (or can be) REPL-based, Clojure(script) especially, but that's almost a whole paradigm in and of itself.


Having spent a lot of time writing both Clojure and Rust professionally, I think a lot of the benefit you get from a REPL is making up for the lack of a good type system and good IDE support. I also find that the support Rust has for unit tests partially makes up for the lack of a REPL.

Clojure has a bunch of other benefits over Rust when it comes to quick prototyping though.


For me the most interesting and non-obvious property of the code is how the whole thing interacts in the long run, but you can't possibly figure that out with REPL as preparation of inputs would be immense.


In Haskell, you always know the shape of the input, so this completely misses the point of what the commenter above is trying to say.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2026 batch! Applications are open till July 27.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: