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Comment by anon3_ | Hacker News Reader

This is big news. Java should have had this one from the start.

My question is, what took so long? What prevented it?

I'd say that Java's verbosity doesn't lend itself well to interactive use. There are quite a few REPLs that allow calling Java code from another language, e.g. the integrated Javascript interpreters (run `jjs` in a terminal), BeanShell, Jython, JRuby, etc.

Don't forget Groovy! It's expressly built to bring "dynamic feeling" to Java.

And don't forget that Java can call Groovy code ;-)

The lack of interest. If you haven't used a language that has a REPL you don't know how powerful it is. Most of the Java devs I know haven't used REPL with any other language.

Beanshell was there since 1999

Yes, finally someone remembered it!

Reinventing the wheel is so human...

I know right? But if you say groovy and the like are just respin of age old stuff they treat you like an old fart

And to think that when I advocated for writing business logic in a scripted language in 2003 everyone was looking at me like I was crazy (well italy is always quite behind last trends, so while in the states they were starting with scripting languages we were still writing ejb with xml - and we still do in many places)

In fact, JavaREPL (http://www.javarepl.com/) with its standalone version exists for very long time.

Several months ago I wanted to have an REPL for C and couldn't find anything satisfactory and I had the similar thought: Why weren't there any decent REPL for C ?

Have you looked at these?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9641832

https://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/cling

http://blog.pclewis.com/2010/03/tip-using-gdb-as-an-interact...

All Java IDE's have offered an interactive shell for years so there is little need for a REPL. It's just a nice thing to have but nothing more.

This is nothing new. When I was at uni (10+ years ago), we used DrJava, which includes a Java REPL.

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