90% seems high. Pick the best IDE hot reloading experience you know of - for me that's JRebel so not actually provided by my IDE but available to me there and

90% seems high. Pick the best IDE hot reloading experience you know of - for me that's JRebel so not actually provided by my IDE but available to me there and way more powerful than the hot swapping natively available in the JVM and usually exposed to me through intellij IDE. E.g. i can change the arity of a function with jrebel but not with hot swapping in intellij. Compare that experience with editing my code and inline without starting any companion process, without triggering any hotreload function, without even saving my source file, being able to evaluate the results of changing a function and seeing the results either inline or in a dedicated buffer depending on the keystroke i chose to trigger the evaluation. I'm doing a terrible job of explaining the difference i see - what i'm digging at is the lisp approach is completely frictionless. The JRebel experience which is great, the best i know if in a non-lisp language, is full of little (and some large) frictions. >> tooling matters much more than the language itself I'd suggest a counterpoint to that, the tooling for java is really very good - and yet, there's a better experience to be had with "structural editing of forms" in clojure than there is going back to "normal editing of lines of code" with java. I think most languages i've experienced can be interchanged to a large degree - java, javascript, c#, c, rust, python, ... unless the task is something exotic, i can probably complete the same task in any of those in a comparable way. Lisp, SQL, prolog and array languages are different though. The way i would solve the task in those is likely to be radically different in approach.