alt Hacker News> There is real, palpable, practical, functional difference between working a Lisp REPL and a REPL in a non-homoiconic languages
Smalltalk is not homoiconic, and it's REPL experience is equivalent (I'd argue somewhat better, but that's mostly a tooling thing, see the commercial CL implementations as examples of improvements over SBCL + Emacs + Slime). Homoiconicity is not the trait that makes the CL REPL experience better than others, it's that it includes a very good debugger, the compiler, hot code reloading, the ability to redefine classes and update current instances, and so on.
That's the tooling, not the language, that provides the experience. Nothing about being non-homoiconic prevents other languages from having a comparable (or even better) experience.
> Nothing about being non-homoiconic
Nothing about being statically/dynamically typed. Nothing about being functional/OOP/relational/logic. Nothing about being pure/side-effecty/strict/lazy. Nothing about being compiled/interpreted. Nothing about imperative/procedural/stack-oriented.
You can pick just about any single or (few) aspects about any language. Heck, it doesn't even have to be a programming language and you can find things to complain about.
You know that there are three genuine, true, legit ways to build robust, bug-free, performant software? Three! The problem? Nobody knows what they are and that's why we are all doomed to keep bashing on everyone else's choices and opinions.
"Better experience" is not dictated by "features". Better experience comes, well, with experience.
I suppose it's my own fault. I tried focusing on "holistic, overall experience", yet still picked a single aspect to chime in.