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Comment by watmough | Hacker News Reader

They are smoking crack if they think anyone will use a scripting language that doesn't have a functioning REPL.

My goto-languages for quick development are Perl 5, Clojure and Javascript.

All 3 are adequately fast for real tasks. All are cross-platform, and all 3 support a REPL that allows doing real work interactively.

These conditions are the absolute minimum to be viable as a scripting or sketch/prototyping language.

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There is an alternative: a quick start GUI mini-IDE which allows you to type in and edit the code and press a button to run it. Such tools are mandatory on Windows anyhow: Ocaml and Python both have this for example. Most Unix editors like Vim or Emacs could be programmed to do this fairly easily I guess. I even wrote such a tool once using Tcl/Tk.

I agree this is not the same as a REPL with line by line interactive execution/editing with an environment that saves well defined symbols. Ultimately this would be tough to see through because Felix binds functions statically and lookup is setwise (like function scope in C) not linear, so recursive definitions cannot be introduced one at a time.

This isn't very difficult to configure in Sublime Text 2 for different languages.

What REPL do you use for Perl?

The most bare bones is: 'perl -de 0' CPAN has a few others

As aflott does, I use the built-in debugger as REPL for most simple uses.

I also use re.pl from Devel::REPL (https://metacpan.org/module/Devel::REPL).

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