I think in 2007, when Clojure first released, it wasn't common the way it is now that a language comes already with a full set of official tooling maintained al

I think in 2007, when Clojure first released, it wasn't common the way it is now that a language comes already with a full set of official tooling maintained alongside it. I feel this trend started later on. That said, it's also because Clojure is not its own runtime, so its actual tooling is the same as Java's. This is how it started, just expecting you'd use Maven as was standard in Java back then. Its the community that kind of decided they didn't like to use the Java tooling and on their own brought Clojars and Lein as replacement. So I think that's why at first there wasn't any, and later the core team thought, okay, well, if people want Clojure tooling and don't want to just Maven as maybe it was first intended, then they'd rather take it over and do it how they think is best. This is my interpretation of the history at least.