I think chii was referring to a much more sophisticated REPL experience which doesn't require blowing away application state. This is possible in truly live environments like Smalltalk (checkout Squeak) or a competent Lisp environment. You can incrementally update your program from your editor and keep going all without reloading. This is how ClojureScript developers interact via the browser REPL for example.
Ah ok, fair enough. I'd heard that Smalltalk had a really good environment for this but I've never looked into it.
Let me rephrase then. There are amazing server side REPLs that allow me to change code on the fly, why can't I change code in my editor and have it reflected directly in my browser?
