A repl is a very important tool in the arsenal of a programmer. It allows one to test bits and pieces of code and then assembling that into a running program. Examples of this includes the excellent firebug utility for firefox and various shells (like the python shell). There has even been tries to bring a repl to C#, but the languages is not at all designed for this purpose, so it’s a crude hack at best.
Often developing using the repl consists of a lot of copy pasting back and forth between then editor and the repl. Moving the repl into the editor makes this even less painful, but I would argue that in order to fully embrace a repl one has to have something like lisp, or a very good editor (that I havn’t seen yet). In lisp it’s very easy to take parts of a function and evaluation only that part simply by finding the right parenthesis and evaluation that. Using Emacs and SLIME it’s a simple two-key-gesture.
But one can take it one step further. Why not simply start your program as a repl, instead of adding a repl to your program. That way also the running state of the program can be determined. But in order for that to work, one has to be able to redefine functions without stopping the program. Clojure allows that, and it’s the key that makes it all work.
Programming in clojure is a process of organically growing your program in a bottom-up fashion where the running state of the program allows one to inspect, debug and fix programs all without shutting it down.
The best way to do this is to start up a repl in a seperate process and then to connect to that process, that way one can always disconnect and reconnect again when the need arises.