[bmillare]

I found a useful way to deal with start up times and enable fast command line driven scripting. Start up Clojure and create a socket repl server. Write a bash script that passes a string of Clojure code to netcat, which feeds that into the socket repl server. All the Clojure code embedded in the string does is load a path as a clj file and binds any command line arguments to command-line-args. The arguments are pulled by the bash script and inserted in the string of Clojure code. With the bash script in your path, you can now add #!/usr/bin/env name-of-bash-script-in-path at the top of any clj file, make the file executable, and then execute it instantly like any other bash script but now the full power of Clojure.

I found it useful to override the print and prompt method so that they are silent, requiring the script to explicitly print to stdout/stderr if desired. I reuse the socket-repl reader to enable exiting via :repl/quit which is echoed in the bash script after the script is loaded.

The obvious downside is you have to start at "server" before any of this works but I think the main interface limitation was the inability to interact with Clojure from the command-line and with other command-line tools.