I can think of a REPL use case I don't know how to do easily in another language. Doable yes, but easily and conveniently, no.
I want to build a little tool for the command line: meaning it should be runnable at any time I pull down my terminal, easily started and stopped. In it, I want to listen to a Telegram room. Basically the idea is, in this Telegram room, things are announced, and I want to look up some of them. It could be anything: sneakers, toys, concert tickets. But let's say crypto projects, as there is a running stream of them all day. (Doesn't have to be if you don't like crypto but let's go with it for now).
So I'm printing this list of crypto projects to the screen. Every so often I want to hover over one and get more information about it. For example, pretend there's a project called PGPalooza, one of many that's being printed in this list that's spilling out in real time on my terminal screen. I scroll up to PGPalooza and run a command on it, and then it runs some commands and opens up a few browser windows that I can look at to learn more about it.
This is easy to do in Lisp, in an intuitive natural way, that I don't think I could do with the same ease in other languages. You could think of this as demonstrating the benefits of interactivity in action. I can scroll up and modify the PGPalooza text to read lookup("PGPalooza") and then press Ctrl-E at the end to return one type of data, and financials("PGPalooza") to see another. It's also very easy to modularly add commands to it too, to expand on this.
I want to build a little tool for the command line: meaning it should be runnable at any time I pull down my terminal, easily started and stopped. In it, I want to listen to a Telegram room. Basically the idea is, in this Telegram room, things are announced, and I want to look up some of them. It could be anything: sneakers, toys, concert tickets. But let's say crypto projects, as there is a running stream of them all day. (Doesn't have to be if you don't like crypto but let's go with it for now).
So I'm printing this list of crypto projects to the screen. Every so often I want to hover over one and get more information about it. For example, pretend there's a project called PGPalooza, one of many that's being printed in this list that's spilling out in real time on my terminal screen. I scroll up to PGPalooza and run a command on it, and then it runs some commands and opens up a few browser windows that I can look at to learn more about it.
This is easy to do in Lisp, in an intuitive natural way, that I don't think I could do with the same ease in other languages. You could think of this as demonstrating the benefits of interactivity in action. I can scroll up and modify the PGPalooza text to read lookup("PGPalooza") and then press Ctrl-E at the end to return one type of data, and financials("PGPalooza") to see another. It's also very easy to modularly add commands to it too, to expand on this.