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A comment on Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread. Parent comment

Re:Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread by bad_user on Monday March 02, 2020 @01:29AM (#22462151)
A command-line tool is nothing more than a script that maybe parses some input from the program's arguments or from stdin and then does something useful. Naturally you want to have the libraries you're used to available and the best language for CLI tools is the one you already know.

Building CLI tools in C/C++ is silly. If you like Rust/Go, sure, knock yourself out.

But the obvious choices are the scripting languages with runtimes that are already distributed as part of the OS .On Linux most CLI tools are built in Python or Perl and Ruby or Node.js are decent choices too.

JVM languages aren't an ideal choice due to the startup time, but given the size of the ecosystem you can find a library for pretty much anything you need and now we've got GraalVM to help with the startup time. So not a bad choice either.

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Re:Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread by dzamo_norton on Tuesday March 03, 2020 @09:58AM (#22474909)
That... just ain't so. So many of the GNU programs written for the command line are in C, are performance sensitive and would be crippled by any of the scripting languages you've mentioned. You don't have to look far: grep, sort, sed, find, base64, tar, ...
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Re:Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread by heavenlyblue on Tuesday March 03, 2020 @09:40AM (#22474763)
>> Python or Perl and Ruby or Node.js

Idk - If I wrote a tool in any of those languages and used state-of-the-art features then you would not be able to use them with the system interpreter and you’re back to square one.

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