One of my produtivity challenges is starting projects. When writing, I struggle with the blank page. When faced with a big project, I struggle to decide where to start. My suspicion is that REPL-driven development facilitates tinkering that gets me over that initial hump. — Programming horizons revisited
I would add that the REPL-driven approach to data analysis (R or Stata compared to, say, SAS or SPSS) let you ‘feel’ the data in a particular way. Think of exploratory data analysis, for instance.