[JoelMcCracken]

I believe both of those languages have motivational roots in the parallel computation drive/what I am describing as the FP zeitgeist.

For example, this ya the earliest reference to clojure I could find on hn. Notice the text of the announcement and how it focuses on parallelism https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/comp.lang.lisp/xvK...