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])<p>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?<p>[1]: https://observablehq.com/@balazsbotond/js-url-library-draft
> Why aren't<p>Because lisp and smalltalk lost the language wars. Interaction with dead text files won. No one misses what they never experienced.
My initial thoughts<p>1. You can setup similar experiences in a pure terminal mode<p>2. Am I shipping private code to yet another 3rd party server?<p>3. Having to copy/paste seems annoying, would want it on top of my VCS code directly