When I started out writing lisp, I found the distinction between foo and 'foo tricky to grasp. It bothered me that 'foo wasn't printed 'foo.
I think this is easier to learn when symbols are printed differently. If 'foo is printed user::foo it's easier to grasp what a symbol is.
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One interesting property of both stdin/stdout based REPLs and RPC based REPLs is that they need to support asynchronous events.
In both these programs, I don't need to wait until the function is done to see the output printed. It's not sufficient to read-eval-wait-print-loop.
I have a theory: Suppose I created a language Foo that printed execution time at termination:
$ ./hello
Hello World!
(Finished in 0.6 seconds)
I'm sure that Foo developers would be particularly sensitive to performance (for better and worse).
I'm coming to the conclusion that CS papers need to be printed.
They don't suit ereaders (PDFs don't reflow), they're too small on smartphones and I find a laptop less portable.
I suppose the clue is in the name!