We Lost Something: 1970s REPLs Were Better Than Modern Development Environments
3 days ago
- #Programming History
- #REPL
- #Development Environments
- 1970s REPLs (Lisp, APL) offered superior interactive, exploratory programming environments with instant feedback and persistent context.
- Modern development environments fragment the experience across language-specific tools, IDEs, and build pipelines, prioritizing production efficiency over developer experience.
- REPLs prioritize developer productivity with features like instant feedback, quick iteration, and minimal context-switching, unlike production code which focuses on execution speed and memory efficiency.
- The UNIX command line resembles a REPL but lacks persistent language state and other critical REPL features.
- A proposed REPPL (Read-Eval-Print-Persist-Loop) model makes persistence explicit, using JSON for state serialization to enhance debuggability and cross-language compatibility.
- Future vision suggests building REPPL engines at the OS level, treating the operating system as a universal programming language and development environment.
- Potential improvements include a 'Revive' step to restore previous states, leveraging modern hardware for better persistence and continuity.