Measuring a Lisp operating system's "success"

Dwight Hughes dhughes@intellinet.com
Sun, 4 May 1997 16:05:00 -0500


| From: Chris Hanson <chanson@mcs.com>
|
| I would consider LispOS a "success" if in the end it produces an OS
written
| in Lisp that runs on modern stock hardware, *regardless* of its market
| penetration or financial return or effect on the larger software
| development world.
| 
| I feel this way because an OS implemented in Lisp is something
interesting
| that your garden-variety OS project these days hasn't really attempted,
| since most people appear to want to reinvent the hell out of the wheel
(aka
| Unix).
 

Agreed. What we are looking for is considerably beyond the present status
quo.
We do at least have the LispMs as a proof of concept, but I don't really
want to replicate one - just the best parts of one, with the best ideas
from
everywhere stirred in as well, as is useful and reasonably practical. Piece
of
cake <g>.

If we can do what we want and do it well it would stand as a major counter-
example to all the ad-hocian bloatware OSs and their miserable low-level
systems software architecture and models. That alone would be a "sucess"
to me.

-- Dwight