SighMagi

> the truth is that not all REPLs are created equal

Indeed.

Second to Smalltalk (where the entire environment is your REPL), the best REPL is a Common Lisp REPL. Even the most primitive of Common Lisp REPLs is more useful than a Clojure REPL. This is because the Common Lisp is designed with interactive development in mind.

In Common Lisp, an error doesn't print out a stack trace and leave you puzzling to parse its meaning – it drops you into the debugger where you can inspect the entire system (including local variables on the stack where you are), invoke whatever restarts apply, modify code and continue on.

the-alchemist
True, the CL REPL is more useful than the Clojure REPL, but CL has a 20-30 year head start in development. Plus, Clojure was developed as a hosted language, and runs on .NET, Javascript, JVM, and even Dart (in-progress).

Since exceptions are quite deeply integrated into those platforms (as opposed to conditions), it has "bled through" to the Clojure APIs, and, in turn, REPL.

Folks have written a CL-style condition/restart library for Clojure (https://github.com/IGJoshua/farolero) too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp0OEDcAro0 video too.