Make mistakes fast, fix them even faster November 13th, 2007
A great blog-post about Lisp and some of principles of Agile Development. Having a very short edit-compile-run cycle (put on your "I HEART REPL" badge) spoils you to no end. Also see this InfoQ article about the same topic.
I consider it one of the biggest advantages of a Lisp development environment, and am glad the same warm and fuzzy feeling is around when coding Ruby. Smalltalk programmers would agree also.
It's even more important when you're developing web applications I think, where things like XHTML, CSS and Javascript come into play. I've got bad habits on that end, my cycle can often be too short: code 3 lines, ALT-TAB Firefox and hit CMD-R; rinse and repeat. I would tear out my hairs if I had a long compile cycle or had to restart web-servers...
