@eccentric_j I’m interpreting your question as follows: do I have similar issues with Clojure as the person you describe, when working on new tooling?
I do see where he/she is coming from: dirty REPL state, slow startup, lack of static typing. But the alternative might be giving up on interactive development, which is a style I very much like about Clojure. It’s easy to capture some values that flow through a function in development, inspect it, make some changes, and build stuff out that way. No distracting write/compile/run cycles. Subjectively, I feel more productive in a language like Clojure than say, Haskell or Scala. Clojure is a tangible language whereas other languages feel more like watching things from behind a window once you have compiled the program. I do like some of the aspects of these languages and the guarantees they can give you. But some of those perceived benefits can also get in your way.
The tools I’ve been writing recently (clj-kondo, babashka, jet) are mostly command line tools. From an application development perspective, they are not so different from other Clojure projects, if not easier to hold in your head.
Clj-kondo helps me prevent or recover from dirty REPL state in many cases. Babashka and GraalVM partially solve the startup problem, at least for a significant subset of Clojure.