It's not just being on the JVM that causes the annoying stack traces. It's certainly possible for Clojure to inspect errors and provide better ones. But then

It's not just being on the JVM that causes the annoying stack traces. It's certainly possible for Clojure to inspect errors and provide better ones. But then it needs to know a lot more about its hosting VM. The crappy stack trace situation was a design decision to keep Clojure loosely coupled to its VM, allowing it to be more easily ported to JS (ClojureScript), .NET (Clojure-CLR), etc.