... is the Java community really so isolated from Ruby, Python, .Net (LINQ), any Lisp, [EDIT: Haskell,] etc? I mean, Scala and Clojure really are nice, but they are hardly revolutionary.
The revolution comes in multiple, overlapping waves, whose frequency is measured in decades.
From common lisp, Clojure is a very interesting step. It's much more practical and has a modern structure-reduction style that common lisp predates. It also has all the might of the jvm and that strong and community behind it; the comprehensive std lib that was common lisp's original advantage now looks small and dated in comparison.
As for Haskell, a similar situation exists with Scala. Haskell will continue to be an interesting platform, but the huge amount of work to adopt many of these concepts to the jvm and an object-oriented world have a lot to offer people.
The other hidden benefit is that the jvm can be a new common platform, with java as the new "C glue" layer. You can realistically write a library in Clojure and have it a client to Scala code, which runs critical services inside a JRuby rails app.
So yes, the jvm language community is coming together with big value propositions quickly. They're beginnig to coalesce in a way the CLR family of languages never really has.
P.S., All the languages named here have value and interest and a lot of hard work in them. I have my current set of preferences and opinions on what I'd like to work in, but I don't want to imply any derision towards any of them.
Scala and Clojure both provide higher level facilities for concurrency then Java, Python or Ruby.
Scala and Clojure both have solutions for the expression problem, a very real issue when growing code bases (every OO language should have this)
Clojure provides metadata - a lovely concept of attaching information to an object w/o affecting it's value or needing to 'wrap' it in a class.
All these things add up to a significantly more productive experience. Especially as a project evolves over time.
Well, maybe, Lisp, 3-4 decades ago, was.