Paul,

if you haven't seen it already, you might find the description of the Us
variation of Self (which makes it a kind of Smalltalk in my view)
interesting:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/5049.html

You might also want to see Dan's Squeak-on-JVM (I don't have Java here,
so I can't test whether this URL still works):

http://Weather-Dimensions.com/Dan/ForwardToThePast.jnlp

Note that some people were interested in getting Squeak to run on top of
Strongtalk's VM and that would match your request for a non Smalltalk
syntax (it is written in C++).

While I can see how Python might seem like a success to be emulated from
a Squeaker's viewpoint, I am sure the notion would seem very funny to a
VisualBasic programmer.

I think there is still an important role for systems which can be
understood by a single person (an entirely separate issue from making it
easy or not to collaborate). There are huge advatanges of being able to
just pick up black boxes created by other people but there are also
costs - such systems tend to grow exponentially in size for linear gains
in functionality.

-- Jecel