I used Clojure before leiningen existed. It's very possible to run Clojure from the command line without it, to specify classpaths yourself, to manage dependencies by hand, even to build an executable JAR.
There's not much documentation for doing that stuff though, because (almost) nobody wants to do that. It's painful.
Re:Clojure 1.9 is now available
by thomastjeffery on Friday December 08, 2017 @07:28PM
(#15883360)
> There's not much documentation for doing that stuff though, because (almost) nobody wants to do that. It's painful.
That is what I encountered when I first tried to learn Clojure.
I essentially gave up at that point. Installing the JRE is enough of a pain on its own.
In case it helps, my app actually bundles an entire Clojure environment (including the JRE) so you don't need anything else installed:
I like to know how a toolchain works, how libraries are linked, etc. I don't want to rely on "magic" that can be incompatible with alternative "magic".
Clojure didn't provide a good low-level interface, and I ended up giving up on it for that reason alone.
Now that there are some minimal command-line tools, I think I'll give it another look.