First proposal: what should LispOS feel like?

[Kelly Murray]

> What would motivate anyone but LISP users to adopt such a system? Surely

Only Lisp programmers will use this Lisp (Silk) Machine.
Our goal is to create/convert people into Lisp programmers!

Why would they do that?  Because they want/need to develop maintainable
web-based applications quickly using the VirtualLM.
The best platform to run this on is a RealLM which is fast and efficient,
and further gets rid of all that UNIX junk too.
We can dream about RealLM's eventually replacing UNIX,NT, 
but don't count on it, and we don't.

> 1. A hierarchy of worlds.
> 2. Some mechanism for restarting ONE world if something does get messed
> up, rather than the entire machine. I suppose this would require some kind

Let me also clarify how I see this working in this regard.
I don't see a single address space machine, though that might be
find for starters.
I see a machine where processes have their own private, transient memory,
BUT they share persistent objects which reside in databases.
The db's can be accessed read-only, or writeable,
If they are writeable, synchronization between processes is done
using transactions.  If one processes "dies", it implicitly detaches
from any databases, and if it made any modifications,
the state is rolled back to it's previously consistent state.

> way. Also think novice users that can't be trusted to keep out of parts of
> the machine they don't understand. I KNOW I will probably not be able to

We can just not give novice users write access to
db's that contain classes of objects which are critical, like USER objects.

-kelly