Not a Joke

I have a long and somewhat embarrassing history with LISP that goes back to the years when it was fading from academia and LISP machines were giving way to Macs and DECstations (a transition that should be familiar to anyone who read the UNIX-HATERS Handbook), so I got properly hooked on Clojure when it came out. But Clojure had the huge disadvantage of being tied to the Java virtual machine. That dependency was also one of its superpowers, but I always saw it as its biggest flaw. Despite that, I used it in production for a few years and have been mourning the fact that you can’t have it without the JVM ever since. On a Raspberry Pi or an ARM SBC, starting a JVM just to run a REPL feels like bringing a shipping container to a picnic. Joker was the escape hatch I’d been looking for–a standalone Go binary that understands most of Clojure’s syntax and needs no external runtime. I started using it for scripting and linting years ago, and when I began thinking about building gi (my own…