[pbohun]

If were talking about wild dreams, I would like to see a modern Plan9-like operating system written in lisp.

While the Plan9 mouse chording is cool (and could be kept), I would have everything also accessible via keyboard commands. 3 button mouse chording on a laptop trackpad is not fun.

[mananaysiempre]

Executable-images-and-bytestreams (Research Unix, Plan 9) and everything-is-in-$LANGUAGE (Lisp machines, Emacs, Smalltalk, Oberon, Forth) environments seem largely contradictory to me, because much of the flexibility in Unix seems to come from the freedom to ignore as much structure in the data as you want to, while programming-language environments seem to derive their advantages from expressing the structure in as detailed a way as possible. (In particular, they really want to invent their own storage formats for everything.) I don’t have much of an idea about Inferno, but my superficial impression is it also mostly ends up as a single-language island.

Which is annoying, because both of these approaches produce some really attractive results, so I’d very much like to learn about any attempts to reconcile them.

[zozbot234]

"Expressing structure" is just a higher layer on simple bytestreams. Some historical operating systems only supported special-cased "file types" with hard-coded structure, but the *IX folks found out that the simple bytestream is enough.

[pjmlp]

It used Limbo and was called Inferno.