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I think this all the time. I have to refresh my clojure repl because I forget what I've eval'd or not and the cognitive load of mentally tracking that state is

• geocar 10y ago
  Clojure is unusually leaky compared to Unix/Linux or (for example) Erlang. If we design systems out of a collection of processes, that we can replace at will, then what we actually have is a collection of checkpoints and branches that we can try simultaneously. Replacing individual branches allows us to try out changes there, without having to rebuild (and wait) the entire system. Another way to think about this, is that Clojure is more like subversion than like git: It might be better than RCS, but you're still stuck with a linear revision history, and new changes can't completely conflict with old objects and old changes that are created. And yet another way, is to imagine all of those old class definitions that old objects hold onto are actually global variables, because they have global (time) extent, and yet are unreachable, so it's difficult to find out whether your new code is being affected by those old settings. Smalltalk, and even other (esp. Commercial) Lisps don't have this problem. It has nothing to do with interactivity, but with hidden state.