Based on Eric Normand's REPL Driven Development series, if I'm not mistaken, he considers evaling from the editor part of the REPL driven development flow, so i

Based on Eric Normand's REPL Driven Development series, if I'm not mistaken, he considers evaling from the editor part of the REPL driven development flow, so it seems that evaling from the editor could also be considered "using the repl" edit... I think I'm seeing that your question is more of a point that you're making. Yes, it's nice to be able eval from the editor, but now being a professional Clojure developer after having been a Python developer for years, I would agree with the arguments that typing lisp (s-expression) code in a repl is much easier than Python, because you don't have to worry about indentation. This probably applies to other languages for different reasons. eg. Java... I can't even imagine what a REPL would be there. My repl usage in python was usually just calling a function I wrote in the editor. Same with my little experience in Ruby.