I had a weird introduction to programming. I spent my first half year doing php, and them went all in on scheme and sml. Which is nice in many ways, but I do have a hard time accepting many of the completely braindead (subjective opinion, of course) choices of most of the popular languages.
I do think clojure is a pretty nice compromise. Rich has good taste, obviously. Clojure's core.async could be less async and more CML in my taste. Wrapping a simpler async api in cml is easy. Implementing CML on top on core.async is either very hard or full of compromises.