> when you have REPL you are TDD’ing in a different way as opposed to constructing persistent unit-test classes that could potentially form a layer of cement.
Lately I've been using the console for development in rails and javascript more than anything and it is a really good way to iterate on a solution quickly.
Especially in a functional language, if you architect your code well, e.g. avoiding large (lengthy) functions. You write a function, test it in the REPL, and forget about it. Until, of course, someone hands it data you weren't expecting. But here Clojure helps you a bit with it's effort to provide consistent interfaces to its collection types, e.g. lists, vectors and maps. And the most expressive and fast to write code in, the more time you can devote to testing.
I'll bet in practice this sort of TDD works very well, as long as your coders are diligent. For the projects I've done this way, including a couple in C using a very good but now defunct interpretive environment for it (CenterLine's CodeCenter/ObjectCenter), it's been superb. In an extreme case, I spent around a week programming in C the engine of a high speed document imaging scanning system, at which point I got the driver that let me speak directly to the scanner. The first time I tried it end-to-end it worked ... until I ran out of file descriptors (had forgotten to close() each file after writing out its contents).
There was of course a whole lot of experience that made that feat possible, but I found it very impressive how the environment allowed me to write code with so few flaws (that was, in fact, the only major one I can remember once I declared a function finished and ready to try out for real).