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Admittedly I'm nitpicking an explicit design decision of a fantastic achievement (Clojure), but when studying it, it bothered me that Java/JVM stuff actively surfaced rather than being entirely a concern of the implementers. I had/have never programmed Java and have no interest in it, but nonetheless had to start caring about what java.blah.Things and their API were; what JAR files, Classpaths, Classloaders were all about; etc. For me, this alien stuff nestled in and around Clojure-proper brought a scattered feeling to what otherwise felt very tight and coherent.

Like many programming languages, Clojure was designed to solve the problems that its implementer (Rich Hickey) was having. That is, Rich wanted a powerful, fast and complete Lisp implementation centered around concurrent processing to run on the JVM. That the JVM is front and center is a design feature. It's not a feature that will appeal to everyone, but it's a feature nonetheless.

There is a Smalltalk implementation in Factor

http://factor-language.blogspot.in/2009/04/sup-dawg-we-heard...

Also from that page,

"If you want to experiment with language design but don't want to spend five years implementing a language like we did, you should consider using an existing system to host your language on, and Factor is one of several great choices in this regard." - Slava Pestov, Creator of Factor

Also worth noting pypy: http://pypy.org/

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