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