Had you worked in Fortran, Pascal or Algol or C, and been forced to think linearly to a deck of cards, and a job queue, and do all the marshalling of the IO into that job queue through some horrendous syntax of JCL of some kind, then the experience of being in a REPL might be more momentus. Instead you're a fish swimming in clear water not understanding why water is so unbelievably amazing if you haven't been in it before.
Of course LISPians want to make their REPL very meta, compared to any REPL, and it is: its degree of self-introspection, and the potential to modify the REPL is a REPL on steroids experience. But just being a REPL, is pretty damn amazing if you had to uplift from write-compile-assemble-marshall-coordinate-queue-run-cleanup "before"
(I did learn on punched cards in the 70s. Bugs hurt at a 20 min production-to-run cycle, some people were a drive away from the batch queue, and a 1 day turnaround was good.)
Of course LISPians want to make their REPL very meta, compared to any REPL, and it is: its degree of self-introspection, and the potential to modify the REPL is a REPL on steroids experience. But just being a REPL, is pretty damn amazing if you had to uplift from write-compile-assemble-marshall-coordinate-queue-run-cleanup "before"
(I did learn on punched cards in the 70s. Bugs hurt at a 20 min production-to-run cycle, some people were a drive away from the batch queue, and a 1 day turnaround was good.)