I tried REPL with Kotlin and Java, both sucked: REPL with Kotlin is deprecated, unsupported and getting removed;
REPL with Java is just bloated. Gave up. I’m becoming a huge fan of the “No tools” movement - use
as few tools as possible. I believe this approach leads to simplicity. Tools lead you to the vicious cycle of
complexity: tools hide the complexity away from you, which means
you’re getting away with complexity, which means it creeps in, and you solve that with more tools.
That also means that Jetbrains has an incentive to make Kotlin as complex and feature-rich as they can get away with,
since their business model is to sell you tools. I’m starting to get disinterested in that, I’m fed up with Merchats
With Complexity. No-tools also simplifies the ramp-up for newbies: imagine a newbie having to study Maven/Gradle, Intellij
just to run Hello World app and then do something just a tiny bit more complex (like parsing YAML/JSON/XML or such).