My experience with IRB has been so-so. I've found it fine for experimenting with small functions as I develop them, poking at interfaces, etc. But it's really n

My experience with IRB has been so-so. I've found it fine for experimenting with small functions as I develop them, poking at interfaces, etc. But it's really nowhere near the experience I had with Clojure and a repl-integrated programming environment. I've only been using Ruby on Rails for a little under a year, so I have some more learning to do, but I'm not hopeful about the productivity story. Repl-driven development in Clojure with Emacs and CIDER [0]: You develop a namespace or two at a time and you're looking at a handful of files in your editor. You can move between function definitions, modify them, and re-evaluate them as easily as moving the cursor and pressing a key. The whole editor becomes a playground: every piece of code you see can be changed and evaluated as fast as you can think. You can execute a web request from cURL or the browser, and your Clojure repl is hooked into the running program. So you can capture real inputs, store them in temporary vars, play them back, change them on the fly, etc. The IRB is just very linear in comparison. [0]: https://cider.mx/ https://cider.mx/