Contributor
Snehil Shah

A better Node.js REPL for Numerical and Scientific Computing


Mentors
Philipp Burckhardt, Stephannie
Organization
stdlib
Technologies
javascript, node.js
Topics
developer tools, cli, Repl, Interactive Interpreter
The read-eval-print loop (REPL) is a fixture of data analysis and numerical computing and provides a critical entry-point for individuals seeking to learn and better understand APIs and their associated behavior. For a library emphasizing numerical and scientific computing, a well-featured REPL becomes an essential tool allowing users to easily visualize and work with data in an interactive environment. The stdlib REPL is a command-line based interactive interpreter environment for Node.js equipped with namespaces and tools for statistical computing and data exploration enabling easy prototyping, testing, debugging, and programming. It aims to be a better alternative to the Node.js REPL with a specialized focus on scientific computing and data analysis. This project focuses on implementing a suite of enhancements to the stdlib REPL including fuzzy auto-completion, syntax highlighting, visualization tools for tabular data, bracketed-paste, multi-line editing, custom keybindings, and workshops for numerical computing, to ultimately achieve feature parity with similar environments for interactive computing like IPython and Julia.