thinking about virtual machines, etc.

[Paul Prescod]

Maybe the people who worked on the Lisp machines could explain to me why
this environment really has to be Lisp-centric. What seems to me to be
interesting to it is that 

a) the operating system services are written in a dynamic HLL, source is
available, and you may trace into "services"

b) rather than passing around streams one passes around objects. Rather
than serializing objects explicitly you just mark them persistent

c) really good Lisp development tools are available.

It sounds to me that what we are talking about, then, is a nice object
oriented (as opposed to file oriented) operating system with really
tight emacs bindings. Is there any reason it should be Lisp-centric,
then? The Java and SmallTalk people would probably be also interested in
such a system. It might actually stand a chance of mainstream success if
we team up with others who are rebelling against systems without the
properties above.

 Paul Prescod