Now, not every programmer prefers that kind of development. Some programmers prefer to think of development as a process of designing, planning, making blueprints, and assembling parts on a workbench. There’s nothing wrong with that. Indeed, a multibillion-dollar international industry has been built upon it.

In fact, there’s a style of programming, well known in Lisp and Smalltalk circles, in which you define a toplevel function with calls to other functions that don’t yet exist, and then define those functions as you go in the resulting breakloops. It’s a fast way to implement a procedure when you already know how it should work.

Re-open libraries for exploration I use in-ns to jump into library namespaces and re-define their vars. I insert bits of println statements to help understand how data flows through a library. These monkey-patches only exist in the running REPL. I usually put them inside a comment form. On a REPL restart, the library is back at its pristine state. In this example below, I re-open clj-http.headers to add tracing before the header transformation logic: [source] ;; set us up for re-opening libraries (require 'clj-http.headers) (in-ns 'clj-http.headers) (defn- header-map-request [req] (let [req-headers (:headers req)] (if req-headers (do (println "HEADERS: " req-headers) ;; <-- this is my added print (-> req (assoc :headers (into (header-map) req-headers) :use-header-maps-in-response? true))) req))) ;; Go back to to the user namespace to test the change (in-ns 'user) (require '[clj-http.client :as http]) (http/get "http://www.example.com") ;; This is printed in the REPL: ;; HEADERS: {accept-encoding gzip, deflate} An astute observer will notice this workflow is no different from the regular clojure workflow. Clojure gets out of your way and allows you to shape & experiment in the code in the REPL. You can use this technique to explore clojure.core too!