[linguae]

For years I’ve wanted a FOSS macOS clone, but in recent years my interest has shifted away from that and toward what inspired NeXT (and the Mac) in the first place: the Smalltalk environment. I’ve dug down deep rabbit holes exploring Smalltalk, Lisp machines (particularly the Symbolics Genera and Xerox Interlisp-D environments), HyperCard, Apple’s Lisp-inspired work in the 1990s (Dylan, SK8), and the OpenDoc component-based software framework.

My dream OS would be something with malleable, component-based underpinnings (like a Lisp machine or the Smalltalk environment, but with everything we’ve learned about security, type systems, parallelism, and other concerns since the 1980s when Lisp machines and Smalltalk were in vogue), extensive support for programmability (everything is an object), and with an interface inspired by Mac OS 8 (I love Tiger, but from an interface point of view I prefer the classic Mac OS more). Unfortunately my free time is limited, so I haven’t done much work at all, but it hasn’t stopped me from dreaming and writing a few occasional documents.