Java's annotations could be seen as 'part of the environment' (whatever that may mean). I often use annotations which indicate how a method should be used, and those annotations are used by static analysis to validate correctness.

When using Java, I often change my program while it is running. recompiling classes on the fly. It works in most cases, and when it doesn't work, I believe other languages would fail as well.

You say Java is deeply flawed. I argue that Java is one of the most successful languages around nowadays. It does what it is designed to do: be relatively easy to learn, a natural successor to C++ with a wide range of libraries. Yes, Java code can often be verbose, but this depends greatly on the kind of paradigms used. I can write verbose and ugly code in Clojure and write relatively concise and elegant code in Java. It depends on architecture, a good understanding of OOP (and its limitations), composition over inheritance. The problem with Java is the sheer amount of 'bad' code written in it (because of all the leagues of beginner programmers), giving it a bad name. Have you seen Clojure code of a large product (equivalent to around 1M code lines of Java), produced by a team of diverse programmers and maintained by another team during a 10 year lifespan? You would cringe just as hard.

Finally, lighttable is a proof-of-concept... It's not there yet; there are no reviews; leagues of smart engineers have tried to reproduce something similar and could not escape the POC phase at all.