Lisp

Please stop with this rubbish narrative

Let me explain the general context here, because I don't think this is rubbish at all.

What I am talking about is the general design of Lisp-based OSes, such as OpenGenera and Medley, or indeed Smalltalk, as compared to OSes built from statically-compiled languages such as C, C++, Modula-2, Oberon, and so on.

This is the same thing Steve Yegge was talking about in a different blog post of his:

https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/01/pinocchio-problem.html

Which happened to come up today here:

https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/there-are-no-strings-on-me/

It's also one of the overarching themes of loper-os.org.

If one is using Emacs on a Lisp OS, and one changes the definition of a function that, say, displays a window title bar or something, then the whole OS reflects that immediately, Emacs included.

If you did it in, say, Linux with TWM, nothing changes until you recompile and reboot.

On a Lisp OS, Emacs was just part of the whole, and you could change something in Emacs and the OS reflected it.

But if you are on Linux using Emacs with SLIME to edit some SBCL code, when you change the Emacs Lisp code, nothing happens to your SBCL code. Change the SBCL code and nothing changes in Emacs.

They are in little isolated boxes, which can talk but are not interconnected... even if Emacs is the editor used by SBCL.

Interlisp is perhaps the only extant FOSS Lisp environment where this can still be observed. That's why I mentioned it.