Luu's claims made me hold off on pushing people to contribute to Julia as I waited for corroboration (or refutation) of them. I appreciate you linking to that very fair post that replies to it. The contrast between how the two of your present your claims adds credibility to yours. I also got a great laugh out of part about one guy that barely speaks English using the project as a personal Stackoverflow. A problem I'd have not anticipated starting a language/compiler project haha.
Curious, are you all still coding the internals of the compiler in femtolisp, is most of it written in Julia indirectly relying on that, or no LISP now? A barrier to entry question basically.