Hey, I also enjoyed the article... and would definitely be interested in reading more about macros.

But unrelated to that, I wanted to comment on this observation:

> In my current project, it takes almost 30 seconds to boot up a development REPL. Half a minute!

I work mostly with JVM languages and the JVM startup nowadays is actually very fast for a VM, under 100ms for your code in main to be running from a cold start. 30 seconds to boot is completely unheard of in my experience. If whatever you're using is open source, I wouldn't mind having a look to figure out what the problem may be.