Benevolent Dictatorship

[Paul Prescod]

I would say that if this LispOS project is feasible it will *just
happen* at the right time. That sounds mystical but isn't: at the point
where an X86 hosted Unix became feasible, somebody just picked up the
ball and made it happen. I believe that this has not happend with LispOS
because a) Lisp itself does not have enough of a following, b) we are SO
FAR from what we want that it hurts the brain to plan a path and c)
nobody is foolish enough to take that first step down that very long
path.

I think that the project would be more likely to succeed once those
three problems have been solved. That suggests to me that the first
priority should be making CMUCL a competitive, popular development
environment. The second priority would be to start experimenting with
editors, shells, compilers and other things that can be built without
"changing the world." Changing the world in one stroke is doomed anyhow:
people have work to do and they only want to move to OSes that allow
them to get their work done (i.e. use Unix apps). Finally, once the
critical mass has been achieved, a messiah will appear. You will
recognize him or her because he/she will say: "I've got this neat little
kernel I hacked up. It's compiled with CMUCL and uses EMACS as its UI.
Would anyone like to work on it with me?"

 Paul Prescod  - http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

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