Exploratory programming

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Exploratory programming, as opposed to implementation (programming), is an important part of the software engineering cycle: when a domain is not very well understood or open-ended, or it's not clear what algorithms and data structures might be needed for an implementation, it's useful to be able to interactively develop and debug a program without having to go through the usual constraints of the edit-compile-run-debug cycle. Languages such as APL, Cecil, Clojure, C#,^[1] Dylan, Factor, Forth, F#, J, Java,^[2] Julia, Lisp, Mathematica, Obliq, Oz, Prolog, Python, REBOL, Perl, R, Ruby, Scala, Self, Smalltalk, Tcl, and JavaScript, often in conjunction with an IDE, provide support for exploratory programming via interactivity, dynamicity, and extensibility.