There are just too many possible puns in this question.

The clojure community is known for its highly advanced sense of humor

Huh, I completely missed that. That's half of it then, the other half would be futures implementing or extending completion stage, then they can be passed to other parts of the JVM which expect completion stage. Not sure how viable it is, looking at the implementation. But that and implementing the functional interfaces would make for a more ergonomic experience