Scala REPL in Emacs

(the text below is my opinion, it should not be taken as fact or an insult)

With Emacs you are expected to have it open 24/7 and live inside the program, almost everything you do can be done from there. You write your own extensions, use it for note-taking, organization, games, programming, shell access, file access, listening to music, web browsing. It takes weeks and weeks till you will be happy with it and then you will learn new stuff all the time. You will be annoyed when you don't have access to it and constantly change your config. You won't be able to use other peoples emacs versions easily and it won't just be installed. It uses Lisp, which is great. You can make it into anything you want it to be. (anything, at all)

With Vim, it's almost always pre-installed. It's fast. You open up a file do a quick edit and then quit. You can work with the basic setup if you are on someone else's machine. It's not quite so editable, but it's still far better than most text editors. It recognizes that most of the time you are reading/editing not typing and makes that portion faster. You don't suffer from emacs pinkie. It's not so infuriating. It's easier to learn.

Even though I use Emacs all day every day (and love it) unless you intend to spend a lot of time in the program you choose I would pick vim

You mentioned an important point which Scala lacks a bit: the documentation.

The REPL is a fantastic tool, but it is not as fantastic at it can be. There are too much missing features and features which can be improved - some of them are mentioned in your post. Scaladoc is a nice tool, too, but is far away to be perfect. Furthermore lots of code in the API is not yet or too less documented and code examples are often missing. The IDEs are full ob bugs and compared to the possibilities Java IDEs show us they look like some kindergarten toys.

Nevertheless there is a gigantic difference of Scalas current tools compared to the tools available as I started to learn Scala 2-3 years ago. At that time IDEs compiled permanently some trash in the background, the compiler crashed every few minutes and some documentation was absolutely nonexistent. Frequently I got rage attacks and wished death and corruption to Scala authors.

And now? I do not have any of these rage attacks any more. Because the tools we currently have are great although the are not perfect!

There is docs.scala-lang.org, which summarizes a lot of great documentation. There are Tutorials, Cheat-sheets, Glossaries, Guides and a lot of more great stuff. Another great tools is Scalex, which can find even the weirdest operator one can think of. It is Scalas Hoogle and even though it is not yet as good as his great ideal, it is very useful.

Great improvements are coming with Scala2.10 in form of Scalas own Reflection library:

// needs Scala2.10M4
scala> import scala.reflect.runtime.{universe => u}
import scala.reflect.runtime.{universe=>u}

scala> val t = u.typeOf[List[_]]
t: reflect.runtime.universe.Type = List[Any]

scala> t.declarations
res10: Iterable[reflect.runtime.universe.Symbol] = SynchronizedOps(constructor List, method companion, method isEmpty, method head, method tail, method ::, method :::, method reverse_:::, method mapConserve, method ++, method +:, method toList, method take, method drop, method slice, method takeRight, method splitAt, method takeWhile, method dropWhile, method span, method reverse, method stringPrefix, method toStream, method removeDuplicates)

Documentation for the new Reflection library is still missing, but in progress. It allows one to use scalac in an easy way inside of the REPL:

scala> u reify { List(1,2,3) map (_+1) }
res14: reflect.runtime.universe.Expr[List[Int]] = Expr[List[Int]](immutable.this.List.apply(1, 2, 3).map(((x$1) => x$1.$plus(1)))(immutable.this.List.canBuildFrom))

scala> import scala.tools.reflect.ToolBox
import scala.tools.reflect.ToolBox

scala> import scala.reflect.runtime.{currentMirror => m}
import scala.reflect.runtime.{currentMirror=>m}

scala> val tb = m.mkToolBox()
tb: scala.tools.reflect.ToolBox[reflect.runtime.universe.type] = scala.tools.reflect.ToolBoxFactory$ToolBoxImpl@32f7fa37

scala> tb.parseExpr("List(1,2,3) map (_+1)")
res16: tb.u.Tree = List(1, 2, 3).map(((x$1) => x$1.$plus(1)))

scala> tb.runExpr(res16)
res18: Any = List(2, 3, 4)

This is even greater when we want to know how Scala code is translated internally. Formerly wen need to type scala -Xprint:typer -e "List(1,2,3) map (_+1)" to get the internally representation. Furthermore some small improvements found there way to the new release, for example:

scala> :type Predef
scala.Predef.type

Scaladoc will gain some type-hierarchy graph (click on type-hierarchy).

With Macros it is possible now, to improve error messages in a great way. There is a library called expecty, which does this:

// copied from GitHub page
import org.expecty.Expecty

case class Person(name: String = "Fred", age: Int = 42) {
  def say(words: String*) = words.mkString(" ")
}

val person = Person()
val expect = new Expecty()

// Passing expectations

expect {
  person.name == "Fred"
  person.age * 2 == 84
  person.say("Hi", "from", "Expecty!") == "Hi from Expecty!"
}

// Failing expectation

val word1 = "ping"
val word2 = "pong"

expect {
  person.say(word1, word2) == "pong pong"
}

/*
Output:

java.lang.AssertionError:

person.say(word1, word2) == "pong pong"
|      |   |      |      |
|      |   ping   pong   false
|      ping pong
Person(Fred,42)
*/

There is a tool which allows one to find libraries hosted on GitHub, called ls.implicit.ly.

The IDEs now have some semantic highlighting, to show if a member is a object/type/method/whatever. The semantic highlighting feature of ScalaIDE.

The javap feature of the REPL is only a call to the native javap, therefore it is not a very featue-rich tool. You have to fully qualify the name of a module:

scala> :javap scala.collection.immutable.List
Compiled from "List.scala"
public abstract class scala.collection.immutable.List extends scala.collection.AbstractSeq implements scala.collection.immutable.LinearSeq,scala.Product,scala.collection.LinearSeqOptimized{
...

Some time ago I have written a summary of how Scala code is compiled to Bytecode, which offers a lot of things to know.

And the best: This is all done in the last few months!

So, how to use all of these things inside of the REPL? Well, it is not possible ... not yet. ;)

But I can tell you that one day we will have such a REPL. A REPL which shows us documentation if we want to see it. A REPL which let us communicate with it (maybe like lambdabot). A REPL which let us do cool things we still cannot imagine. I don't know when this will be the case, but I know that a lot of stuff was done in the last years and I know even greater stuff will be done in the next years.