I've tried to learn Clojure a few times and just bounced right off every time. I found it impossible to read and frustrating and tedious to write. Everyone else who tries it seems to fall in love, but I really don't get it.
Perhaps you've done it wrong? To read any Lisp code one needs a REPL. And you don't typically type directly in it, you connect to it and eval things from source files. Once you get connected to a REPL, you can eval any expression and sub-expression, and with practice, you'd learn to grok the code without a REPL.
And for writing Lisp, you only need structural editing support in your editor. Once you find basic commands - moving structures around is far more enjoyable process than writing things in an unstructured language.
I am far more productive using Clojure instead of Java and Clojurescript instead of Javascript, Fennel instead of Lua, etc. - it's easier to read, easier to modify, easier to maintain. But, yeah, it does require some practice, just like any other skill.
I'm not sure what you mean by structural editing support. I usually find things like autocomplete or automatic parenthesis to be more of a nuisance than a help.
No, REPLs in other languages are not equal to REPLs in Lisp dialects. I bet what you are describing is not the same workflow that an average Clojurian would use. In other languages you typically type directly into the REPL console. With Clojure, you typically connect your editor to a running REPL instance and then manipulate things directly from the source code - you basically write the program, while living inside it - your codebase becomes a living, breathing, maleable entity.
Structural editing has little to do with autocomplete, it's just a way to manipulate expressions - move them around, raise them, transpose them, wrap/unwrap, etc.
I suppose you tried to understand Clojure by looking at the code, and that could be challenging - without proper REPL and structural editing support, it may not be the same joyful experience that many Clojurians know.
Or you'd run a curl command once and continue exploring the data - parsing slicing, dicing, grouping, sorting any way you like, or even have it visualized in the Portal tool with charts and graphs.
Look, I'm currently writing tests for a thing, while my IDE is connected to a service running on a Kubernetes pod in the cloud - I can eval any function that affects the execution of the service, I can explore the db tables, change the routes and re-run the tests - all that without having to restart the pod, without having to deploy anything, without even having to save any files (if I don't have to).
Lisp REPL-driven development gives you immediate feedback, allows you to modify and debug running programs on-the-fly, allows you to experiment, it's great for understanding language features interactively, and it's a real, tangible productivity boost - it's superb for rapid prototyping.
> Interactivity is great, but it doesn't make up for the language itself.
The language is what allows that great interactivity and exploratory programming. I mean, I get it - while it may initially appear challenging to read, much like how sigma notation for loops in mathematics can be difficult to comprehend, with practice it becomes intuitive. One wouldn't go to math.stackexchange to complain about sigmas and other mathematical symbols being unintuitive, would they?