Yes, exactly. It's perhaps my fault for not making this more explicit in the essay, but the "repl" in "repl-driven programming" does not mean the repl window.
Yeah, I suggest you expand upon that, or perhaps another article showing that "conversation". Unfortunately, some people - including me - have only used a repl in "one-direction" and have to copy stuff back and forth.
That's a good suggestion. Walking through a set of interactions is a solid idea.
For what it's worth, there are some videos around of people actually doing it with Lisp and Smalltalk systems, and pjmlp already posted a pile of them elsewhere in this thread.
I can add a few more:
Kalman Reti walking through some interactions with a Symbolics LispM repl:
There are some other things I'd like to find for lists like this, but haven't been able to. In particular, a good demo of Apple's SK8 would be great.
If you can imagine a full-color Hypercard that could crack open and reprogram absolutely everything on the screen, including the machine code that drew the window system's widgets, all in a repl while the code was live; in which you could grab an arbitrary widget and drop it on the repl window to get a live variable reference to the widget, and then inspect it, operate on it, and reprogram it, again, while everything continued to run; in which you could build new window-system widgets by snapping together shapes and telling them to become widgets; in which you were not limited to HyperTalk for coding and text strings for data, but had a full Common Lisp at your disposal plus a Minsky-style frame system for representing data and knowledge, then you have some idea of what SK8 was like.
