&gt;<i>Almost every programming language can have a REPL, it is called an interpreter. Anyone with a CS background should know this.</i><p>That&#x27;s the theory though. The practice is (was) that Lisp had an excellent REPL, and most languages didn&#x27;t have one at all, or had a crappy one.<p>Some languages lend themselves to a REPL by making it much easier to program one. iPython is great, JS ones are decent. Go attempts at REPLs otoh are mostly BS.  C++ REPLs (Cling) etc, are neither very handy nor very popular. Etc.<p>The truth is, some languages handle the REPL situation much better than others. And &quot;scripting&quot; languages are usually better than others at that.<p>And REPL is not really just an interpreter. You can have an interpreter without having a REPL, or without having the kind of full featured REPL we&#x27;re talking about. Most BASICs run with an interpreter, but didn&#x27;t have a REPL, for example.