Welcome!
I don’t know that you can pause at any time in Julia, even when running in the available interpreter. At least in the REPL. There are tools to set breakpoints and more traditional debugging. I believe integrated in the VS Code extension. Lisp (and Smalltalk) are I believe the gold standard in interactive development, and Julia likely best after such languages.
You may want to start out with Pluto.jl, it’s reactive, not exactly the interactive experience you’re after.
This seems really cool (just proprietary), showing what possible, but also what you don’t have with current tools, and even this I believe allows no modification:
How does that compare to what you have in Lisp?
Be sure to use Revise.jl, it’s extremely good, and allows by now redefining everything I believe (e.g. structs; the last annoyance until recently for interactive work; AI is still ignorant that recent improvement, and maybe others you may talk to, so old comparisons are too pessimistic about Julia), and Tamas Papp migrated from Lisp way before Revise got that good, or not even sure it existed back then.
From Papp in the community here (and others):
and response to it (might be outdated, I haven’t read it in a while): not-common-lisp-to-julia.org · GitHub
Seems like a successor to (that you can already use, but also likely should not, more of a demo?):
LispSyntax.jl: A clojure-like lisp syntax for julia
In case any of this helps you interact with Lisp/Clojure or migrate (in stages):
I’m not sure how good this is, just found it:
There are more e.g. Free Clojure to Julia Converter - AI Code Translation | CodeConvert AI and Free Julia to Clojure Converter - AI Code Translation | CodeConvert AI and others: Julia to Clojure Converter - CodingFleet and outdated: GitHub - vshesh/Sexpr.jl: julia <3 clojure + macroexpansion · GitHub