TBH I think debuggers are just better anyways. When I got into the weeds with trying to do this interactive REPL workflow on actually running webapp code in Clojure it was a big mess. You have to use clojure code to basically capture data and save it into global variables so that you can inspect them (as opposed to a debugger where you can just set a breakpoint and inspect all the variables in the middle of the precise spot in the request-response cycle.

I think maybe this was ahead of its time when it came out in 2008 or got popular in 2010-2015, but nowadays I am not seeing what's specifically more productive about the Clojure REPL than the interactive development experiences available in Laravel, Python, JS, etc.

That's where "code is data" shines and you can manipulate it at will. For the rest, I'm glad I have "code as text" in my editor, where I can see and inspect it far more easily than one line at a time.

If it was like a choice, Clojure has my favourite reverse debugger flowstorm which also exposes the runtime information of your program programmatically

So you can code cool visual programs against the runtime values of your first program

Like I built an emulator at work that simulates our program in production as a flowstorm plugin then you can step through the program frame by frame

I love taking the guess work out of production issues, just get the computer to show you exactly how everything went down

It's like a rewindable movie made up of thousands or millions of frames of the execution of your program