"This turns Clojure into a scripting language much like Python, Ruby, Perl, or Bash" would be if you added a sleep(45) to the beginning of every script you wrote with them. All the latency of a compiled language with all the bugs of dynamic one. :)
I'm (mostly) kidding...
I want to like clojure. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for lisp, and clojure seems to be the best contender for hitting the right balance between the classic "no syntax at all, just more parens" and various more modern takes on "It's lisp, but with our own weird syntax bits layered on." Unfortunately the JVM'ness of it has shown through so much as to kind of turn me off. (Not least of all the overhead of starting a JVM to do anything.)
What bothers me most about clojure is the abstraction leak when it comes to errors. When something goes wrong (say you passed a value of wrong datatype to a function), it just spits a java error stack. I'd like to have feedback closer to the conceptual level of the language, than to the intricacies of the run-time.
Spec instrumentation solves this perfectly for Clojure and ClojureScript. There's a price to pay, sure. Namely speccing your functions, but specs are defined for the functions in clojure.core.
For me, Racket is the sweet spot. It has a surprisingly good story for a lot of use cases, good included batteries, truly great documentation, static typing when you want it, the ability to make a redistributable native(-looking?) GUI app, better-than-python/ruby/other interpreted languages performance, etc.
I do like some of Clojure's syntactic sugaring, but I haven't yet decided whether it's worth it to me to use Rackjure (Clojure-isms ported to Racket).
As a racket user I wouldn't say racket is a good scripting language unless you use racket/base and manually require the extra cruft. Startup is quite darn noticeable even on my relatively fast ssd-equipped laptop. For small scripts the startup time is often by far the largest part of the total run time.
As a scripting language the startup is a pain (It has been getting much needed attention just this past month and they are seeing a big improvement on that)
In terms of having a soft spot for lisp and clojure I find that Racket is the best thing ever for scratching that itch. I really am excited by clojure for scripting though.
If you want to keep the repl running this is fine, but for scripts, you should be using planck[1] or lumo[2]. Planck in my experience has nice command-line args parsing by default, both should be fast enough not to be annoying when running scripts.
Only sort of related, does anyone have any insight into whether Slamhound will eventually support ClojureScript? Namespace declarations were probably my least favorite part about Clojure until I happened on Slamhound, now I pretty much don't have to think about them. Working with ClojureScript without Slamhound is rather annoying...
Boot is too slow to start. Use Lumo, which is based on Node.js and boots really fast. And npm packages are available too. Well, it's more JavaScript than Java.
I thought Boot's scripting features were removed in the 2.0 release? If I remember correctly, there was a major overhaul in both its API and feature set. I'll have to revisit the changelog/docs.
Anyways, running a clj file using the provided shebang does indeed work! Albeit _much_ more slowly than a comparable Perl|Python|Ruby script.
I'm (mostly) kidding...
I want to like clojure. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for lisp, and clojure seems to be the best contender for hitting the right balance between the classic "no syntax at all, just more parens" and various more modern takes on "It's lisp, but with our own weird syntax bits layered on." Unfortunately the JVM'ness of it has shown through so much as to kind of turn me off. (Not least of all the overhead of starting a JVM to do anything.)