I spoke to my housemates over dinner about what they like about programming in R, and they don't know the word for REPL, but it seems to be the REPL. They get a benefit similar to static types from the interactive environment
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In that they can catch errors much earlier and localize them and figure out how to fix them
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I love REPLs and other interactive environments, but then I would, since I work on interactive theorem provers. I like when programming and proving is a conversation between me and a tool
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It's interesting to me that interactive environments are huge on both extrema of typing disciplines, but not nearly as much in the middle
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I really wanna see what expressive type systems + a smalltalk/self/glamourous toolkit/lisp machine style environment would look like!
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Kind of tangentially related: I love how in Lean there's commands to evaluate and inspect stuff in the language itself. You don't even need to execute commands to reload the file… it's all updating live, thanks to the IDE integration. It's a bit like a REPL, but more immediate.