One useful utility built into Clojure is the ability to pop up a Swing app that can inspect a data structure. The inspector comes with clojure core so just do this to start using it: user=> (use 'clojure.inspector) If we want to look at our data in the form of a tree we can do something like this: (inspect-tree {:a 1 :b 2 :c [1 2 3 {:d 4 :e 5 :f [6 7 8]}]}) which will yield the following gui: Or t