> At some point, I brought a MicroVAX with me to a vintage computer convention, and a friend had his MacIvory Symbolics Lisp Machine on display. As the two systems were from the same era, we thought that we should try to bring up some network between them. My VAX ran a fairly recent version of VMS, though, and when we tried to establish a DECNET connection, the Lisp machine would signal an error and put us into a debugger. What got me hooked on Lisp was that my friend could display the source code of the failing DECNET device driver, figure out that the problem was the too-new DECNET version number that the VAX had reported in the connection setup packet, fix the Lisp code in the DECNET driver of the Lisp Machine and then continue the file transfer operation that had signaled the problem. I certainly understood that this would theoretically be possible back then, but I had never seen a system that would have that level of integration of operating system and programming language. I was intrigued.

Makes one wonder if an OS should be built using LISP these days to make available that kind of hackability. Or port Genera OS [1] to x86 or arm. The languages used by the VPRI project were bootstrapped on lisp if I recall correctly [2]. It would be great if that projects code was released as open source too.

[1] http://wiki.c2.com/?GeneraOs [2] http://www.vpri.org/writings.php

orangeshark

There is Mezzano[0], but I am not sure if it has a similar kind of hackability. I believe environments like that are pretty amazing. It is something that is not unique to just lisps either, you see similar features in Smalltalk environments like Pharo[1].

[0]: https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano

[1]: https://pharo.org/