Clojure Development: IDE or REPL?

Question

I\'ve been using Clojure for a little while and want to create some projects that are bigger and more complicated than toys. I\'ve been using Java for the past few years and hav

Answer 1

The REPL development approach has been encouraged by most LISP family (and other functional language) IDE's for a long time. Some of these REPL's also feature the auto-complete features you might associate with a Java IDE.

REPL gives you a couple major advantages over the standard approach. The first is that it allows you to execute arbitrary code during the run-time of your program, which can make debugging multi-threaded systems much simpler. Second, and more importantly, it makes it easy to test your functions while you code. You don't need to build a framework around a new function or class, you can play with it directly in the REPL, and see how it responds to a variety of use cases.