My questions:
1. can I make the REPL do "up arrow goes back in your command history" like BASH does?
edit: found the answer to this in one of the tutorials
2. Is clojure a good choice for making a screen scraping bot? normally I would use Perl or Ruby for this.
3. Is clojure (or any lisp) a good choice for doing complicated data analysis?
2. That may depend on what you're scraping. Manipulating semi-structured text data is one of Perl's biggest uses, so it may work a bit better than Clojure for the same purpose. Clojure certainly has decent regex and string capabilities though, so yes, it's a good choice.
3. Yes. There's a very good dataflow library for Common Lisp called Cells. It provides dependent and independent variables that work a lot like spreadsheet cells within a program. There's a partial port to Clojure. Also, Clojure has watchers - functions that can be attached to reference types and run whenever their state changes. Clojure and Common Lisp are quite fast at math, especially with type annotations.
Next up, I'm checking out Cells. (that's for a different project than the scraper)
Thanks!