this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
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A community for the Lisp family of programming languages.
Lisp (historically LISP) is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language. Only Fortran is older, by one year.
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Pretty much everything absolutely does not have a REPL you can connect an editor to and develop your application interactively. This workflow is still pretty much exclusive to Lisps today. There's a huge difference between having REPL as a standalone toy, and actually having it as an integral part of the workflow.
The way I develop applications in Clojure is by first running the whole app, then connecting my editor to it. I have access to the entire application state, any resources such as database connections, I can change any part of the application at runtime and see the results immediately. I can even connect to remote apps and debug an app in prod. When I write new code, I do it interactively step by step. I write a function, see that it works correctly, then write the next, and so on. At each step I know exactly what's going on because I'm running my code live. The only context I need to keep is the function I'm currently working on and the last one I wrote. Trying things, and making changes becomes a much tighter loop with this approach.
Python, Ruby, and even Forth have REPLs that I use all the time. Haskell sort of has one. Not C++ etc though.
I've just explained the difference between these REPLs and what Lisp REPL workflow is like. It's not comparable even in the slightest. Actually read what I wrote above and then try doing that in Python or Ruby.