Ask HN: Why aren't live programming environments more popular?

7 points

6 years ago

I have recently started using Observable notebooks for prototyping JavaScript code. The development experience is amazing - it's like a REPL on steroids. I can even write unit tests that are updated live. Now I write whatever I can inside Observable and then copy the code and test cases to the project I'm working on. (You can see an example of such a notebook here: [1])

I'm certainly not the first person to discover how productive a live environment like this can be. Yet I can't think of any other implementation of this idea except maybe live evaluation when editing Clojure. Why isn't this more widespread? Why aren't we all writing our code like this? Are there any other tools like Observable but less focused on presentation and more on development?

[1]: https://observablehq.com/@balazsbotond/js-url-library-draft

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