Not sure if correlated. In Ruby I do a mix of REPL/console, tests and step-through debugging. When using Python, I always use a notebook as a scratchpad - to me it's a REPL but easier to keep tidy. The notebook can be good docs of how things work too, a complement to tests-as-docs as it's easy to show in different (real) contexts.

I sorely miss being able to do this when working on frontend, have tried setting up node console to import files but React just makes it very easy to couple everything. This leaves me with tests as the easiest way to code outside of a view (which has too much friction for playing around). Hot reloading is great but iterating logic in isolation is way harder without a REPL.