[irjoe]

Interesting. I do the same thing in Elixir where I'll attach an iex session to a Phoenix application so I can interrogate modules and APIs as I'm building them out.

I'm slightly disappointed that it's already something I do day to day. I had hoped that the power of the REPL wasn't overstated.

[rozap]

It's nice to be able to do this in production for debugging. It's super powerful and one of the my favorite features of erlang.

[elcritch]

It's especially handy for debugging IoT and hardware issues.

[adamkl]

I think just because someone is able to do something similar in another language doesn’t mean that the power of a fully integrated REPL is overstated.

Most developers are using languages where this sort of thing isn’t possible, and for them, experiencing a REPL driven development flow can be an eye opening experience (even if it’s just to add it to their tool box along side more common approaches like attaching debuggers and using TDD to shorten the development feedback loop).

I don’t know enough about Elixir to understand how your approach is the same/different than using something like a REPL with Clojure, but I did come across a pretty interesting discussion on the topic:

https://elixirforum.com/t/what-do-you-all-think-of-clojures-...

TL;DR - you can accomplish something similar with Elixir, but the underlying technical details are different.

[oblio]

> Most developers are using languages where this sort of thing isn’t possible

Which language can't do this?