Joshua Niehus:
Serious how hard is it to just do:
then press "Command+b" (Sublime text) and watch it work/fail?
With a REPL you don't need to repeat the precedent computations
every time you add something. You keep building on what you have
already done. This saves you time (beside saving you the time of
hundreds of compilations).
A REPL is handy when you don't know the correct usage of
something: you try something, read the error it gives you, ask
for some help to the system, and try again, etc.
A REPL is very handy when you are doing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploratory_programming
If your interactive system also has some cumulative graphics
output this is very handy, you can rotate and change plot
parameters interactively until you find some good ones (this is
possible in Mathematica).
Bye,
bearophile
