I think he means that Clojure is a dependency (a JAR) that lein installs. npm, pip etc require node or python, they don't bootstrap. Perhaps it doesn't make a

I think he means that Clojure is a dependency (a JAR) that lein installs. npm, pip etc require node or python, they don't bootstrap. Perhaps it doesn't make a huge difference in practice, but it might help in getting everyone on the same version. For node, you need something like volta or nvm.