It’s fun having an excuse to interact interactively with a language, as I work through the Learning SQL examples and exercises; almost all of my interaction with languages since I was an undergraduate has been mediated through a compiler, and I’d forgotten what I was missing.

Hmm: I suppose I interact with bash all the time, but most of the time the interactions are so simple that it’s not really the same thing. Then again, interacting with SQL is hardly as rich as interacting with Scheme. And, now that I think of it, I do evaluate Emacs-Lisp expressions in the *scratch* buffer not infrequently, or redefine functions in my .emacs file (.xemacs/init.el, actually, but never mind that) and evaluate them without reloading the whole file. So I guess my life isn’t as barren as I thought when I started this post. The point that interactive interaction with a language can be quite pleasant still stands, though.

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