Oliver Caldwell's blog
If you’re a seasoned Lisp (or similar) programmer a lot of this will just be rewording of what you already know. If all you’ve ever known is editing source files and restarting your program this should hopefully be new and inspiring.
Conversational software development is a term I’m half heartedly trying to coin to describe a way to develop your program with an incredibly short feedback loop. It aligns closely with hot module reloading for React based frontend applications but with a much tighter focus and an extra dimension that you may not have seen before.
Most languages require you to make changes to your code (possibly recompile) and then restart your program from the beginning with new instructions. This loop can be so long that you lose track of which change introduced a certain bad behaviour, linting tools will catch some things but others are only apparent after they’ve been executed.
We have no way to question our program, if we want to see a specific value at a point in time we have to insert multiple log statements and restart it each time until we get the information we need.
