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Comment by oliyoung | Hacker News Reader

IPython seems really uniquely Python, does a similar “live documentation” tool exist for other languages? I get that Python's usage/culture produces amazing tools like this, but is there anything unique about the language that stops it being ported to JS/Ruby/PHP/C# et al?

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The IPython team are doing just that, and have renamed the IPython project "Jupyter", refactoring all the Python-specific code away into another repository and allowing it to be ported to many other languages: currently over 40 of them. For obvious reasons, interpreted languages are much easier than mandatorily pre-compiled ones... http://jupyter.org

We've made one for JavaScript: https://tonicdev.com

Yes! the jupyter server support 20+ languages!

We built a beautiful real-time collaborative client for it and just launched private beta.

http://lesquare.escherpad.com/@yang.ge/A-Collaborative-Real-...

Swift also allows REPL for documentation.

Other languages either

1. requires compiling/linking, which is unsuitable for trial-and-error, live REPL like dynamic languages.

2. lack of scientific libraries.

3. lack of Web/networking capabilities.

4. lack of graphing libraries.

So consider all these factors together, Python stands out.

Well, Mathematica, the commercial software environment/language has the same kind of thing.

And iPython has been made language agnostic, to work with Haskell, and IIRC, JS.

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