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For reference:

Julia is basically a Lisp under the hood. From playing around with it, it seems like the REPL experience is up there too.




The language is a "reasonable" Lisp, with the caveat that it doesn't have things like reader macros (which is a good thing IMO, and helps avoid the Curse of Lisp).

The runtime/REPL is pretty good too, and can be quite dynamic with Revise.jl, but doesn't have the Real REPL-driven Programming Experience™ as defined here: https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2020-12-18-repl-driven/

I'm not sure how much of the "breakloop" functionality Infiltrate.jl provides, but at least the runtime re-definition of types isn't supported in Julia, and is one of the shortcomings of the Revise.jl based workflow.

All this is not to take away from the original point, Julia does get you a big chunk of the way to being a Lisp and gives you a lot of expressive power. It's just to say that Julia is not just a reskinning of a Lisp with familiar syntax, it has some important design and implementation differences.




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