> I was completely struck by how elegant its codebase is.

Well... I like Clojure but I bet you will reconsider that sentiment if you scroll through https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/master/src/jvm/cloju... .

Maybe not "elegant", but quite readable compiler impl. compared to what I have seen. And which (real world) compiler has an "elegant" implementation anyways.