> You could open up system functions in the editor, modify and compile them while the machine was running.
Why would you want to do that other than hot patching a system that can't go down? Testing new changes requires more time than rebooting. If you just want to test simple changes, most debuggers can do that.
> Everything worked in a single address space, programs could talk to each other in ways operating systems of today couldn’t dream of.
And with a single address space you have win9x security.
> A modern UNIX system isn’t self-contained. I have 4 UNIX systems on my desk (Desktop, laptop, iPhone, iPad) I’m contentiously using the cloud (iCloud for photos, GitHub for text files, Dropbox for everything else) to sync files between these machines. The cloud is just a workaround for UNIX’s self-contained nature
This is just your use habbits. Nothing is stopping you from using NFS or SSHS. Someone who feels the need to use iCloud for whatever trivial convenience it provides is unlikely to benefit from a Lisp machine's ability to edit code on the live system.
> Then we add a gazillion programming languages, VMs, Containers, and a million other things, UNIX is a bloated mess of workaround for its own problems. We need a replacement, something that can be built for the modern world using technologies that are clean, secure, and extendable
The same thing will happen with any OS given enough time. Lisp is also not secure. It's prone to side channel and eval bugs.
> eliminate memory leaks and questions of type safety,
It is type safe. While Lisp is not statically typed, its typing discipline is strong: operations performed on incompatible types signal recoverable errors.
Crashing at runtime, recoverable or not, is usually not what people mean when they say type safe. Spare me the static vs strong academia. Type safe when spoken, in practical every day terms, normally means enforced at compile time with IDE autocompletion support, usually implying static typing.
It's not crashing at runtime, it's crashing at compile time. Or rather, a purely REPL-focused language like Lisp dispenses with the phase separation between compile- and run-time altogether. But then this applies just as much to dependently-typed languages, which come from the "compile time type safety" line of research. You can't be okay with those while dismissing Lisp.
> And with a single address space you have win9x security.
Address space != protection boundaries. These are nearly orthogonal concerns. Where single address spaces might become less useful today is in dealing with Spectre vulnerabilities, though formalizing more explicit requirements about information domains (as in multilevel security, which is a well-established field of OS research) might help address those.
Why would you want to do that other than hot patching a system that can't go down? Testing new changes requires more time than rebooting. If you just want to test simple changes, most debuggers can do that.
> Everything worked in a single address space, programs could talk to each other in ways operating systems of today couldn’t dream of.
And with a single address space you have win9x security.
> A modern UNIX system isn’t self-contained. I have 4 UNIX systems on my desk (Desktop, laptop, iPhone, iPad) I’m contentiously using the cloud (iCloud for photos, GitHub for text files, Dropbox for everything else) to sync files between these machines. The cloud is just a workaround for UNIX’s self-contained nature
This is just your use habbits. Nothing is stopping you from using NFS or SSHS. Someone who feels the need to use iCloud for whatever trivial convenience it provides is unlikely to benefit from a Lisp machine's ability to edit code on the live system.
> Then we add a gazillion programming languages, VMs, Containers, and a million other things, UNIX is a bloated mess of workaround for its own problems. We need a replacement, something that can be built for the modern world using technologies that are clean, secure, and extendable
The same thing will happen with any OS given enough time. Lisp is also not secure. It's prone to side channel and eval bugs.
> eliminate memory leaks and questions of type safety,
Lisp is not type safe.