> Grenchman lets you run Clojure code quickly. By connecting to a running nREPL server you avoid JVM startup time, streamlining your development workflow.
It's irritating to see the same claim repeated again and again. It's not JVM startup time, it's Clojure startup time. Whether it's because JVM is ill-suited for the kind of code Clojure uses or for other reasons I don't know, but JVM itself starts up 100x faster than Clojure on JVM.
Moreover, a daemon running in the background is a just a workaround. To use it you need to write your app in a certain way so that reloading works, and you still need to start the daemon at some point.
I've been working with Clojure for a few months full-time and it was kind of ok, however, for command line utilities, almost anything is better than Clojure. Python, JS with Node, Racket, Ruby, GNU Smalltalk, even Io - all these start up much faster than Clojure. ClojureScript with Node would be an option, but then ClojureScript (and Node). In short: if you need to write a cmd line utility program you should avoid Clojure as much as possible.