Smalltalk is not homoiconic, and it's REPL experience is equivalent (I'd argue somewhat better, but that's mostly a tooling thing, see the commercial CL implementations as examples of improvements over SBCL + Emacs + Slime). Homoiconicity is not the trait that makes the CL REPL experience better than others, it's that it includes a very good debugger, the compiler, hot code reloading, the ability to redefine classes and update current instances, and so on.
That's the tooling, not the language, that provides the experience. Nothing about being non-homoiconic prevents other languages from having a comparable (or even better) experience.
Nothing about being statically/dynamically typed. Nothing about being functional/OOP/relational/logic. Nothing about being pure/side-effecty/strict/lazy. Nothing about being compiled/interpreted. Nothing about imperative/procedural/stack-oriented.
You can pick just about any single or (few) aspects about any language. Heck, it doesn't even have to be a programming language and you can find things to complain about.
You know that there are three genuine, true, legit ways to build robust, bug-free, performant software? Three! The problem? Nobody knows what they are and that's why we are all doomed to keep bashing on everyone else's choices and opinions.
"Better experience" is not dictated by "features". Better experience comes, well, with experience.
I suppose it's my own fault. I tried focusing on "holistic, overall experience", yet picked a single aspect to chime in.
I used Clojure when it first came out, I've used Common Lisp for years, I've also used languages like Smalltalk and many others.
Yes, Lisp environments are nice, but sometimes I think Lispers are so insular they don't realize that other languages have similar things. R, Julia and Ruby have similar environments. Smalltalk is next level.
And homoiconicity is great for macros and parsing but it's late-binding that enables the live programming behaviour, which isn't exclusive to Lisp.
Also if you'd ever gotten deep into say, SB-ALIEN, you'd know the limitations too; Common Lisp isn't magic, it can't just redefine say, instantiated structs in memory. It relies on pointers then switching references on the fly.
Yes they do. God, how did you (and apparently you're not alone) read my rant and still got it 100% backwards? I specifically hinted about not picking a single aspect of a language - REPL or whatever. What is so confusing about my wording on "holistic, overall experience working with it"?
> There is real, palpable, practical, functional difference between working a Lisp REPL and a REPL in a non-homoiconic languages
And it's false. There's nothing special about a REPL in a homoiconic language. Homoiconicity has nothing to do with a REPL or tools.
I do however think SBCL has a very nice environment with great tools (especially it's compiler) and that's why I've used it a lot over the years, but I really think you underestimate the environments in other languages (including the "holistic, overall experience").
You are wrong. You might be correct about the workflow but still wrong about the semantics. Pedantically, your notion is false, because homoiconism gives the REPL a genuine capability (program-as-manipulable-data across the read/eval boundary) that non-homoiconic REPLs lack.