This is an interesting question, but the phrasing sounds a little funny to me. Don't REPLs predate symbolic debuggers? As someone coming from the Lisp world, I've occasionally wondered about the converse: did people create interactive debuggers because their language didn't have a good REPL?
I've used Visual Studio before, and it's an impressive technical achievement, but for personal productivity, I'll take a good REPL any day -- as long as the language supports it.
That said, good REPLs contain a debugger, and good symbolic debuggers contain a REPL, so they're not entirely exclusive.
I've used Visual Studio before, and it's an impressive technical achievement, but for personal productivity, I'll take a good REPL any day -- as long as the language supports it.
That said, good REPLs contain a debugger, and good symbolic debuggers contain a REPL, so they're not entirely exclusive.