miniblog.

Today I learnt that Racket *intentionally* doesn't have a traditional REPL workflow. The authors were concerned about students not understanding the state between the current session and the code on disk. (Arguably Jupyter has some of these features now.)

The lisp model of programming is generally: write a function, evaluate it, interactively call it with some arguments, iterate. Jupyter notebooks are similar. Why not automatically evaluate definitions (not expressions) whilst working? It seems like it could be a satisfying way to work with code.

Reactive notebooks: cell state is immutable, unordered (unlike Jupyter) and naturally lends itself to interactive web UIs!