> Having said that, I think the importance of a REPL is way overstated: it's > pretty easy to throw a few lines of Java code together and run them with > full debugger support (which the REPL doesn't offer) in a matter of seconds.
Assuming you have the IDE open and an appropriate project to hand. Otherwise it is a matter of minutes. > This is much, much more powerful than a REPL will ever able to offer you. Common Lisp's REPL, and Erlang's, if I recall correctly, have full debugging support available. > Another reason why I think REPL's are not that useful is that most of the > problems that I need to investigate require a full runtime environment to > make sense. In other words, I usually need a breakpoint at a specific place > and to run my application in order to set up the environment in a way that > inspecting the code will make any sense. Again, a REPL is very limited for > this and only useful for very trivial situations. Sure, but those trivial situations crop up fairly often. You're in Freenode's ##java, and can probably bear witness to the fact that about 1 in 8 questions there are trivially answerable in fewer characters than the question by using a REPL. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
