> As someone else mentioned, that sounds more like a work environment problem.
Have you ever used any API by, say, a major cloud provider? For example biquery and google docs are both a buggy mess despite being high profile, long established products. Using libraries like pandas is an exercise in figuring out by trial and error how to get it not to corrupt your data and which of the recommended ways of doing things don't involve a 2 orders of magnitude performance defect.
I'm in fact mostly using "repl"-driven development for these types of problems, but of course it's inferior to what I mean by debugger driven, a crippled subset to be precise. The scare quotes are because most languages don't have real read-eval-print-loops either, but something less powerful.
Unfortunately to the best of my knowledge there are basically only two languages which support this: Common Lisp and Smalltalk (maybe factor or something else really fringe also does) and I haven't used either in years. What I mean by debugger-driven is that you can literally write your whole program without ever restarting it, from the debugger. By contrast python can't even properly reload a changed module definition.
Interestingly it's hard to google good explanatory links, but the point is that you can write some code, run into a problem, and fix the problem right there, in the debugger without aborting the current execution or unwinding the stack.
Common Lisp and Smalltalk both have a bunch of unique features that make this type of thing very powerful, for example some function calls another function that's not defined. In python you'd be screwed at this point and restart your program from scratch. In Common lisp you can just write the missing function, compile it and continue the current execution frame as if nothing ever happened. This is because Common Lisp, unlike any remotely popular language allows for resumable exceptions where you can continue from just before the error happened (it also has the usual stack unwinding exceptions).
Concerning low-overhead, selective tracing (that you can run in production without fear of bringing the system down): erlang for example has nice support for this, see e.g. https://github.com/massemanet/redbug (although again unfortunately it will be difficult to grok without any prior erlang exposure).
I’m glad to know that I’m not the only one who thinks a bunch of the cloud APIs are insane. I haven’t had to deal with any of that for about a year now, and I’m quite happy about that.
Re: Python and pandas, I haven’t used pandas, but did quite a bit of numpy/scipy/matplotlib stuff in the past. Jupyter doesn’t quite get where you’re talking about, but it does handle the “only have to repeat one step” things very well.
I only recently feel like I truly grokked the magic of the Common Lisp restart/repl/debugger stuff. Just the other day I used quicklisp to install a package, and at runtime it failed to open a C library (libsdl2-image.so or something like that). While it was paused asking what to do, I used apt to install the missing libraries and told it to retry. Boom. Program was running, and I hadn’t had to restart it even though a shared library was missing when I started it. Hacking on the little game I was fiddling with, I could C-c C-c as I added features to the game and keep playing it with the changes. Un-friggin-believable.
Edit: and yes, if I have to make a backend service these days, it’s generally in Elixir. Not quite the same as the beautiful Lisp stuff, but when your processes are expected to die all the time, it’s really easy to iterate quickly while keeping the system up. I feel like mistakes I make while writing Elixir code help make my overall system stronger.
Yup, your apt-get example is a great one. It's very frustrating that the ability to do stuff like this completely died with common lisp/smalltalk . I don't see the appeal of exceptions at all if you don't have restarts (I'd rather have Either).
Have you ever used any API by, say, a major cloud provider? For example biquery and google docs are both a buggy mess despite being high profile, long established products. Using libraries like pandas is an exercise in figuring out by trial and error how to get it not to corrupt your data and which of the recommended ways of doing things don't involve a 2 orders of magnitude performance defect.
I'm in fact mostly using "repl"-driven development for these types of problems, but of course it's inferior to what I mean by debugger driven, a crippled subset to be precise. The scare quotes are because most languages don't have real read-eval-print-loops either, but something less powerful.
Unfortunately to the best of my knowledge there are basically only two languages which support this: Common Lisp and Smalltalk (maybe factor or something else really fringe also does) and I haven't used either in years. What I mean by debugger-driven is that you can literally write your whole program without ever restarting it, from the debugger. By contrast python can't even properly reload a changed module definition.
Interestingly it's hard to google good explanatory links, but the point is that you can write some code, run into a problem, and fix the problem right there, in the debugger without aborting the current execution or unwinding the stack.
Common Lisp and Smalltalk both have a bunch of unique features that make this type of thing very powerful, for example some function calls another function that's not defined. In python you'd be screwed at this point and restart your program from scratch. In Common lisp you can just write the missing function, compile it and continue the current execution frame as if nothing ever happened. This is because Common Lisp, unlike any remotely popular language allows for resumable exceptions where you can continue from just before the error happened (it also has the usual stack unwinding exceptions).
Here's two examples I found :
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/65ct5j/a_pytho... https://malisper.me/debugging-lisp-part-1-recompilation/
Concerning low-overhead, selective tracing (that you can run in production without fear of bringing the system down): erlang for example has nice support for this, see e.g. https://github.com/massemanet/redbug (although again unfortunately it will be difficult to grok without any prior erlang exposure).