I'm in agreement with silly-silly, but I must say I spent an embarrassingly long time coding before I worked out how the REPL editor workflow worked, and nowadays I feel a bit spoiled because I really do miss it when I'm programming in another language like python. Jupyter notebooks come close, but not quite there.

The thing that really helped was watching videos of talks / tutorials of people on youtube coding something up, for example [0]. I'm not calling that one out specifically as a great tutorial, that's just an example of what I mean =)... I personally would start with an example of a form and then build it up in stages, basically tinkering with the form as I work out how I want it to function.

Another thing is that you don't have to use a particular editor etc. I'm not sure for example if you think you have to use emacs. Don't get me wrong it's a great environment, but if you're a beginner to it and clojure, that's not a good combination. Pick something you like which hopefully has a good repl plugin. There are a fair few options these days. Intellij, vscode, atom, vim among others.

Worst case if you'd like me to sit down and have a short call to go over stuff I'd be happy to set aside a little time =)... I've done tutorial stuff before and it's always nice to help someone else get comfortable in the ecosystem.

Hope that helps.

- [0]: [Clojure, REPL & TDD: Feedback at Ludicrous Speed - Avishai Ish-Shalom](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ngt29DyNDRM)

Nah mate, Stay positive.

You're not the 'swine' here, you shouldn't feel that way. I've learned that sometimes paradigms require the programmer to be in the correct 'frame of mind' before it even begins to make sense, its not you.

In my limited experience, keeping an open mind to tools will get you much further and have more enjoyment in your career and life. Trying to force that square peg into the round hole will just make you hate new things. If the time comes and your mindset is right, the tech will still be there.

Sorry if my above comment sounded like gate-keeping, that was not my intention! One of Clojure's biggest downsides IMO is the barrier to entry, with the relatively complex tooling setup being one barrier. I wrote Clojure for a long time before I finally had a powerful tooling environment, and I wish I'd discovered it sooner.

Your specific setup will depend on your primary editor. For emacs, the go-to is https://cider.mx/. E.g., with my cursor beside an s-expression, I can hit a couple keys to evaluate and view the output. Don't give up!

Just ignore them all. Use IntelliJ with Cursive; has sane defaults and just works. Then you can go the way of Emacs or whatever else you may fancy.

Cursive is awesome.

You could also try Calva if you use Visual Studio Code. It works great for me.