How would you contrast developing with the Clojure REPL compared to irb? I've found irb to be pretty useful for some quick and dirty tasks, albeit not the same level as Clojure (or most Lisps, really).
Repl-driven development in Clojure with Emacs and CIDER [0]:
You develop a namespace or two at a time and you're looking at a handful of files in your editor. You can move between function definitions, modify them, and re-evaluate them as easily as moving the cursor and pressing a key. The whole editor becomes a playground: every piece of code you see can be changed and evaluated as fast as you can think. You can execute a web request from cURL or the browser, and your Clojure repl is hooked into the running program. So you can capture real inputs, store them in temporary vars, play them back, change them on the fly, etc.
The IRB is just very linear in comparison.
[0]: https://cider.mx/
Differences:
- Clojure has namespaces, so you can reload just one unit rather than the whole code - I guess load/require would be closest - You can also just evaluate a single form (e.g. a function definition) leaving everything else intact - if you're using something like Component for state management, then you never restart the repl, just stop the system, refresh your repl state and start the system again - closest thing to 'refresh on request' from Rails' dev mode or PHP, but without the nasty surprises
The drawback is that restarting a repl is a slow process, but it's something you do very rarely. Some folks keep their repl process around for weeks.