I kinda despise non dogfooding projects. Like realizing that IBM rarely ever uses it's own modeling tools and principles to develop internal or commercial software (at least arount that time). And yes I liked lisp because of its underlying beauty. Scheme did one step further. It reuses itself in many ways. That clojure implementation isn't leveraging it's own quality feels unlispy but alas... it's also a huge effort to blend an immutable first lisp onto a JVM ecosystem. Reminds me of Scala a bit.. one lead dev quit over frustration about the state of the compiler. Maybe seeking 'beauty' is just an immature phase and after a while whatever works enough for you to sell ...
Well there's a difference between dogfooding and self-hosting. The Clojure team uses Clojure all the time. They just don't use all aspects of Clojure on Clojure itself.
For quite some time golang specifically set self-hosting as a non-goal. The rationale was that C beat go in many areas that were important to compilers (raw speed, I would guess, initially). It's only recently that they started self-hosting.
So just because you can self-host doesn't mean you should. The benefits have to outweigh the cons. Like any project, choose the best language for the job. That said, I have no idea whether the Clojure system would be better off using more of its own features or not.
