Not sure what you mean here, but... no. You can rebind, of course, but I never found myself in a situation where the REPL was too bad to be used.

I usually restart the REPL only when I add a dependency, so it will be fetched without me caring about it.

I kept getting in this exact situation when defining tests and wanting to _forget_ a test.

And the OC's onboarding experience reminds me of mine. You need some external tutorial / book to get setup.

Also, last time I used calva, the only thing I got was kondo complaining they the default test created in a brand new project were using unknown symbols, or something. So I assumed my setup was wrong, and gave up.

Clojure is "simple made easy _once you've done all the hard part as a bizuthage_"

Why do you need to "forget" ? I either change a test, or - wordst case - redefine it as being empty.

Usually something as trivial as renaming the test function.

Yes that's a pain

FP languages are quite immune to that. Sure, you can probably do some stupid thing, but that likely never happens. At least that’s my experience with Clojure REPLs and Haskell’s GHCI.

Exactly. It ties to the excessive startup overhead. If you rename things and change stuff you must run the tests in a fresh JVM to ensure that everything has been evaluated in a consistent state rather ad hoc evaluation in the REPL. This means running from the command line in addition to your REPL or restarting the REPL regularly.

I don't know - the kind of programmer who's always worried about every what-if probably shouldn't choose any dynamic interactive language in the first place. There are plenty of language permutations out there for all sensibilities.

But programmers should be worried about every what-if scenario, regardless of language.

> worried about every what-if

I hear you about this, but during prototyping one cannot be excessively concerned with did I change the global state enough such that it's better to just start a new REPL (and have to worry about the associated costs)? And if you ask this question a lot, long running REPLs are not a good idea for development.

for prototyping a long running repl is fine.

For validation/testing starting with a clean slate takes away a lot of my worries.

There’s a tool called Clerk which among other things resolves this concern about out of sync definitions https://github.com/nextjournal/clerk