Yep. Same here - I had always thought I agreed with all the arguments mentioned in the post, and then I found Clojure. I'd like to add that I don't know if there are any existing refactoring tools for Clojure, but there certainly could be. All the things that you might want to rename safely - say functions and keywords (used for hashmap access, and serve as sort of Clojure class fields) are proper symbols, well defined in a namespace. You could have a tool that renames them safely. In Scala, OTOH, a statically typed language, you can't even rename methods safely because they're not always referenced through their defining types, as they could be called through an injected so called "structural type". So nowadays, some statically typed langiuage lose, through cleverness, many of the advantages of static typing, while dynamically typed languages, through disciplined restraint, manage to gain them.

EDIT: actually, the one thing I miss most from statically typed languages is the immediate error highliting in the IDE. The REPL alleviates the need for that, but it was still cool immediately seeing files and lines highlighted in red as soon as I type in some error. I wish Clojure could do that.