process VS envy

Check out babashka/fs and babashka/process as well. These are still based on Java interop underneath but they have some more features than the clojure.java.io and clojure.java.sh libraries. I tend to reach for these first when I need to do something filesystem or process related.

A bit off-topic but if you're looking for an up-to-date maintained library to shell out in Clojure, take a look at process

Nothing prevents you from using babashka and still use it as a glue for Unix programs. The difference is you get a nicer language (my opinion), a REPL if you want, and also you do get access to a lot more libraries from Java and Clojure and the pod concept of you want too as well.

So to be clear, you can easily use ImageMagick, curl, jq, pup, etc. See: https://clojure.github.io/clojure/clojure.java.shell-api.htm... and https://github.com/babashka/process

Other benefits are that you only need to learn Clojure and suddenly you can use it for everything, backend apps, frontend apps, scripts, etc. You don't need to learn bash, js and Java/go, make, etc.

> Then I did a very brief search for clojure libraries, things like parsing html. Most of the github projects were not seeing much activity (like last commit in 2020)

This surprises everyone, but those libraries still work, have no bugs, are missing no features, and can be used without issues in production.

Clojure is one of the most stable language, so things never break and almost never need updating.

People have a kind of Stockholm syndrome I think coming to other languages that if something didn't need a bug fix in a year it must be abandoned and broken.

And the reason you often don't need to update those libraries to keep up with the environment, like OS versions, is because they all leverage existing runtimes under the hood like JVM and that's the one that updates. So they're all secure and kept up to date, working with new OS and new architecture for free as JVM updates. This applies to Babashka as well, because it is implemented using a JVM.

when you already know how to compile and run single-module interactive console programs, it takes about a day to understand basics of Cabal, and about a week to learn about input parsing and output formatting. Do you need CLI args? Use optparse-applicative. Env vars? Use envy. JSON? Use aeson. Don't think about performance and/or API conventions, that's not what you should be concerned of at this point, as you are just learning to compose things together from indivdual parts.