Babashka has been available and has had a growing following since 2019. I have many babashka shebang deployed scripts with fast startup. While I would never desire to use Java syntax, AOT capable JVM based Clojure libraries are available and can be loaded dynamically. Built via graal. https://babashka.org
babashka comes with some excellent namespaces. Highlights include babashka.fs -- a functional and effective wrapper around Java file system classes, and babashka.process -- useful functions for interacting with shell processes, i/o and pipelines. I find babashka packaging to be minimal and much more convenient than python for scripting. No massive virtual environments, just a smaller than 70mb binary needs to be available on my machine. Borkdude FTW.
Yes - this is what we need more off - just not only in clojure space.
I done https://github.com/jbangdev/jbang-jash for shell processes and smallrye process io also done a lot for nice shell apis.
Files access could be another.
jbang provides the similar binary - for now bash+jvm based but all simple installable. I have native jbang binaries which are even less than 70 mb :)
Definitely going to check out babashka more for inspiration.