I was talking with a Data Scientist friend abiut what I love so much about Clojure and it was largely about the REPL. To him it sounded like nothing special - trying expressions in a prompt is hardly new or original and he does all the time in R. Which I thought is actually a really good selling point for Clojure - you get to do the really high-level data manipulation you do in R, Mathematica or even Python in a language that is compiled, good with concurrency, probably embraces your platform of choice and is also used for the frontend.
What makes it different for me is two things:
- the functional style mean that many things are much easier to track in a REPL - you don't need to use a stepping debugger to get to the troublesome value of i as often.
- Structural editing using parinfer or similar is fun.
Overall I'm not convinced that the Clojure REPL is that unique, but combined with the rest of the ecosystem it is pretty sweet.
What makes it different for me is two things: - the functional style mean that many things are much easier to track in a REPL - you don't need to use a stepping debugger to get to the troublesome value of i as often.
- Structural editing using parinfer or similar is fun.
Overall I'm not convinced that the Clojure REPL is that unique, but combined with the rest of the ecosystem it is pretty sweet.