I'm going to guess that GVR wants to spend 50% of his time on other things. If you're a language designer and you don't spend half your time programming to core

I'm going to guess that GVR wants to spend 50% of his time on other things. If you're a language designer and you don't spend half your time programming to core business needs, you risk isolation and your quality of inspiration will go down. One of the reasons why Clojure is great is because Rich Hickey actually goes out there into the enterprise and has put a lot of thought into making it an extremely practical language in a wide variety of business settings, without compromising on the things that actually matter.