You don't have to convince me that incremental development at the REPL is a good thing.  But what you're talking about is package management, and Java is perfectly capable of creating an uberjar that contains all dependencies. Even if LispWorks does it better, we're talking about differences in convenience rather than differences in capabilities.<p>Lisp is adequate in many ways, and excellent in others.  But a lot of descriptions of <i>why</i> it's excellent focus on what appear to be trivialities.  Maybe there's some sort of gestalt at work here, where the sum of these minor differences is greater than its parts, but if that's the case you're doing a really poor job describing it.