You can use the features as little and as safely as you want:
> can be useful in extreme situations
it's already useful in development, it's one of those things that shorten the dev loop and make development in CL a breeze. For production, you choose. Connect to the live image to inspect the state without modifying anything or debug while it's live.
> recorded nowhere
you can connect to a running program and have the source under VCS. The thing to do isn't to copy-paste new function definitions in the live image's REPL, but to connect to the image, make changes to the source files, and re-compile them (a C-c C-c in Slime) (sending changes to the running program).
> safer
yep, some things are safer. Advanced features are useful even for simple things (introspection, etc).
> can be useful in extreme situations
it's already useful in development, it's one of those things that shorten the dev loop and make development in CL a breeze. For production, you choose. Connect to the live image to inspect the state without modifying anything or debug while it's live.
> recorded nowhere
you can connect to a running program and have the source under VCS. The thing to do isn't to copy-paste new function definitions in the live image's REPL, but to connect to the image, make changes to the source files, and re-compile them (a C-c C-c in Slime) (sending changes to the running program).
> safer
yep, some things are safer. Advanced features are useful even for simple things (introspection, etc).