Ruby used to be my primary language for many years and I used its REPL extensively in my day to day and found it immensely useful. Is Clojure's REPL different/better than the IRB and pry REPL workflow?
But basically there is a massive difference. Basically the Clojure REPL is not another process you type into, then you copy paste code into your editor. No, you usually write code like you do in your editor, then you can select snippets of code that gets evaluated in the REPL, in the context of your application, with all the running state already there.
I advice you to take a look at the link in my previous comment, which explains it better than I can, and also adds more information about why the Clojure REPL is so different, especially if you embrace it in your development workflow.
In case you missed it, here is the link again: https://vvvvalvalval.github.io/posts/what-makes-a-good-repl....
(replying as a sibling as I suppose we have hit maximum depth)