After reading some of the Hacker News comments about On Repl-Driven Programming, it seems that a lot of people have trouble seeing the benefits of Repl-Driven development. However, for me it is one of the biggest benefits of Clojure.
The most common issue is that people have misconceptions a Repl is, based on their own experience with other languages like Python or Ruby.
It seems common that people expect Repl-driven development to be about editing code directly in a Repl prompt, instead of using an editor and sending code to the Repl. See here, here, and here
Other concerns about Repl-driven development:
- Repl-driven development is about developing an āimageā without source files, making it difficult to know what code is actually running.
- Concerns about documentation: Repl-driven leads to code that works without knowing why it works, because it makes it easy to explore undocumented functionality.
- Repl-driven development leads to bad design because the lack of planning. Also here.
- Repl-driven development is similar to debugger-driven development, where you edit in-memory values to see the effects. See also here and here.
I wonder whether it is worth ārebrandingā the term Repl-driven development to prevent these types of misconceptions. What do you think?