If the REPL session takes any input, including by measuring timings or generating random numbers, it won't be deterministically recreated by a list of commands. And what if I want a fresh REPL?
When I go to Try Arc, I imagine there's a single REPL per window/tab, which goes away as soon as I leave the page. So I think it would be cool to be able to copy out transcripts (without spurious hyphens showing up :-p ) and load/paste Arc libraries, but that's all the power I hope for.
If you're looking for more of a server-side challenge (and more of a productivity site rather than a tutorial :-p ), it would be awesome to have a user account system that lets me paste a bunch of Arc utilities and load them automatically every time I start a REPL.
I'm still a bit suspicious about abstraction leaks in the concept of "save this session." I'd prefer to think in terms of a library pastebin, where I may choose to turn my REPL session into a library but I'm not misled into thinking it'll preserve more about my session than the raw code I entered.
For what it's worth, managing user logins and passwords is a very easy business with WordPress! The challenge would be figuring out how to interface those WordPress user accounts with REPL functionality.
If implemented like HN x-id's you could just refresh or reload the page in order to get a new session. And like HN one could just expire a stored session after x minutes without being used.
Note though: Originally when I posted the session-id idea I was thinking tryarc was only one session with many threads, where each session-id would really just point to its own namespace. Had this been the case it would just be the functions and variables being stored in memory. And then threads/session-ids/namespaces (whatever) could be spun up or down and managed in a myriad of ways.
You: "If implemented like HN x-id's you could just refresh or reload the page in order to get a new session."
That's the behavior I expect, but then I also expect to get a new session if I navigate somewhere and click the back button. If the back button case does not give me a new REPL, I don't see why refreshing the page would.
