Closer but still so far. As soon as you have more than one module in Python it completely falls apart, despite any autoreload magic. It just isn't the same at all as REPL based programming. In Lisps you can write your entire program with an instance and a REPL running the entire time. No restarting the instance required. It works because it's just how Lisp works. A REPL is a trivial thing you can write yourself that runs in the same instance.
Whenever I think about it I can't quite put my finger on exactly what Python would need to make it the same. It's something to do with the way imports and namespaces work, though.
> Whenever I think about it I can't quite put my finger on exactly what Python would need to make it the same. It's something to do with the way imports and namespaces work, though.
Python has a fundamentally broken module system, and Python 3 did nothing to fix it:
Whenever I think about it I can't quite put my finger on exactly what Python would need to make it the same. It's something to do with the way imports and namespaces work, though.