As someone who loves the clojure repl I do somewhat agree with debuggers are better

If it was like a choice, Clojure has my favourite reverse debugger flowstorm which also exposes the runtime information of your program programmatically

So you can code cool visual programs against the runtime values of your first program

Like I built an emulator at work that simulates our program in production as a flowstorm plugin then you can step through the program frame by frame

I love taking the guess work out of production issues, just get the computer to show you exactly how everything went down

It's like a rewindable movie made up of thousands or millions of frames of the execution of your program

To be fair to Clojure, I think it's perfect for rule-engines, where the users supply "business logic" at runtime.

That's where "code is data" shines and you can manipulate it at will. For the rest, I'm glad I have "code as text" in my editor, where I can see and inspect it far more easily than one line at a time.