Read Evaluate Print Loop - REPL for the win

When working with interpreted languages like Ruby, Elixir and Python it is great to use the REPL to discover the capabilities of the various variables that you are dealing with.

Ruby uses irb, Elixir uses irb and to be different Python jumps directly into the interactive prompt using python. In each of these you have the full power of the language to use whatever libraries you have installed by just typing code at the relevant prompt. So at the python prompt you could do the following to see how Playwright interacts with the browser - using code borrowed from an earlier post.

from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright
playwright = sync_playwright().start()
browser = playwright.chromium.launch() 

page = browser.new_page()
page.goto("https://www.selenium.dev/")
page.click("#main_navbar :text('blog')")
title = page.title()
print(title)

The nice thing with each of these REPLs is that they allow you to see the type of the object and the associated attributes and methods, and hence get a better understanding of the library by trying things out and getting immediate success or failure - with an associated error message and stack dump, immediately followed by the REPL prompt for you to try again. Amusingly this even works for overly complex APIs like the Amazon Boto3 python library that you need to interact with the AWS services.