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For me, it's a combination of having a REPL and having a good interactive interface between the editor and the REPL. Typing forms into and evaluating them in the REPL is one thing, but typing them into your editor file and evaluating them from there in the REPL is much more useful. (I can't fairly say one way or the other whether that's possible/common in IPython.)

Here's a short one to give a taste of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ802kSaip4

A good section from another talk specifically about that "don't type at the REPL" point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx0-pViyIDU&t=740s

Here's a longer set of related references: https://clojure.org/guides/repl/annex_community_resources



There's a lot of idiosyncratic advice in those Halloway talks, and people shouldn't blindly adopt it wholesale without evaluating if it's right for them.

Learning to evaluate forms directly from the editor is great, but _never_ typing in the REPL forces you to clutter up a file with evaluations you may not want to save, and jump around a lot between your comment blocks and code.


You can do interactive development in Python using emacs and the “elpy” package. I’ve only used it for small scripts, so I can’t say how it compare to Lisps.




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