Yeah, I think you're right, the REPL itself isn't revolutionary, although I felt as enthusiastic as the op when I discovered it existed. Then I tried to use it.
It's alpha quality, breaks and has to be restarted quite often. And a large part of webapp dev is testing code that is inaccessible from the global scope because of architecture (module pattern, etc). There is some magic however for dynamically loading Google Closure Library code that it wasn't compiled with, but I found setting up correct paths to include my own ClojureScript files to be tricky, especially doing so when targetting platforms with their own particular architectures (eg CouchDB/Couchapps).
That said, I think the op made a very good point about ClojureScript producing code that one would never write by hand. It's really the Clojure/Lisp idioms that are the win. The REPL an accessory, and a nice one, even moreso once the rough edges have been smoothed over.
You can switch namespaces by eval'ing the ns form in your file after starting the REPL. Agreed there are lots of rough edges. But even with those I am able to code / test faster than w/ plain JavaScript or CoffeeScript.
There are definitely rough edges, but the potential is immense. By the way, a recent patch stops alot of the break->restart issues (specifically, syntax errors don't boot you out anymore).
It's alpha quality, breaks and has to be restarted quite often. And a large part of webapp dev is testing code that is inaccessible from the global scope because of architecture (module pattern, etc). There is some magic however for dynamically loading Google Closure Library code that it wasn't compiled with, but I found setting up correct paths to include my own ClojureScript files to be tricky, especially doing so when targetting platforms with their own particular architectures (eg CouchDB/Couchapps).
That said, I think the op made a very good point about ClojureScript producing code that one would never write by hand. It's really the Clojure/Lisp idioms that are the win. The REPL an accessory, and a nice one, even moreso once the rough edges have been smoothed over.