I think the real advantage is scripting with a REPL in your IDE. Whipping up a script becomes trivial because you can test every data transformation (heck, ever

I think the real advantage is scripting with a REPL in your IDE. Whipping up a script becomes trivial because you can test every data transformation (heck, every expression!) with a keystroke. There's no great way to do this in a language without s-expressions.