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When you get into REPL-driven development, the JVM startup time (which is often under a second for me anyways) is a total non-issue. You don't continuously restart your program to see changes or run tests. You can refresh all your state instantly without exiting.

But before Babashka, that was indeed a barrier to using Clojure in shell scripts. Now we have it all!

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Except in Babashka you can't use Java libraries.. Right?

I feel a good fraction of code will dip into Java libs at least a bit - so you're limited in what libraries you can use

I think the real solution is probably Graal native - though it's not part of the official toolbox/deps.edn

In Unix it is customary to invoke tools from the Bash shell or Bash scripts. That doesn't mix well with a separate REPL.

I see your point here... I was addressing to the feedback loop during development time. Babashka works well for Clojure in a Unix tool pipeline.

It's also possible to compile your JVM Clojure program yourself to a binary with GraalVM for even better performance than Babashka and even faster startup.

Clojure and Common Lisp are the two cases where I’ve never felt the need to work in bash: most projects grow a library of utilities for development that aren’t limited by the stringly-typed nature of bash or zsh

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