Immutable things.

[Kelly Murray]

> I don't know that I'm aguing against a limited Lisp (i.e. subset of CL) for
> the kernel.  But I am also unconvinced that it is really needed.

I'm not convinced yet myself.

As the "OS", it can be 8mb and it
wouldn't matter, that is the point, as the OS it is all shared by
every application, so the size is not relevant anymore.
As I've said before, let's not try and refight the last C vs Lisp war
(small and fast deliverables)

What it buys you is an easier job
of doing porting and writing a correct compiler, and less time
debugging/maintaining the core system.  If you're building from scratch,
this is critical.  But from my point of view, we already have ACL
running, ported, debugged, so I'm not convinced.

That said, a simpler dialect makes LEARNING the language easier,
and that IS still important today.   My approach to this issue is to have
SilkScript be the smaller, easy to learn "language" which doesn't
much of CL, more Scheme-like with CLOS.
It doesn't have type declaration for example.
As one becomes an "expert", they can switch
to using full Silk, which would be most of CL.
Of course, they are both basically the same thing underneath.

-kelly