Have you actually ever used a Lisp REPL? Lisp REPLs are different. If you get down to some pedantic level, every stage there - Read, Eval, Print and Loop, are all slightly different. Compared to a simplest, most basic Lisp REPL, any sophisticated REPL in non-lispy languages simply feels like an interactive shell, nothing more. so called "REPL-driven development technique" allows you to build programs interactively - as I said: "it feels like playing a video game" - you can send any expression or sub-expression, almost without any preceding ceremony, directly from your editor, where you'd be typing code. You evaluate things, sending them to a REPL instance. That REPL instance might be in your browser, or some pod in a kubernetes cluster, or a spaceship, million miles away - that's not some science fiction: https://www.corecursive.com/lisp-in-space-with-ron-garret Homoiconicity allows code structures to be treated as what they are, and sending them to the REPL without any kind of transformation. So, yes, while technically, those langs also have REPLs, in reality, writing code doesn't really give you the same kind of feeling.