Clojure seems like a good fit for tiny projects that are little more than scripts, but the start up time makes them kind of annoying to manually test. Fortunately Clojure does have a REPL.
The best cure to this problem is nREPL. It basically is an REPL server. There are plugins for Emacs (nrepl) and vim (vim-fireplace). With these tools, one may start a user repl and run tests within that. I have written a humble guide to set up Emacs for clojure here: http://gkayaalp.com/2014/01/28/taste-clojure.html#emacs My emacs configuration repository is gone thought; I'm using vim these days.
A JVM with smaller memory and cpu needs and faster startup would make me consider using Scala/Clojure again.
"CIDER (formerly nrepl.el) is the Clojure IDE and REPL for Emacs, built on top of nREPL, the Clojure networked REPL server."
That and the availability of the packages on melpa:
cider 20140318.... available Clojure Integrated Development Environment and REPL
And the fact that technomancy's git repository for nrepl.el hasn't been touched in 2 years leads me to believe that cider is the better nREPL choice ;) Be happy to hear that nrepl.el is still maintained and is better in some way than cider, but I don't see cider as being that heavy (at least as compared to SLIME).
Clojure seems like a good fit for tiny projects that are little more than scripts, but the start up time makes them kind of annoying to manually test. Fortunately Clojure does have a REPL.