It is great that we have solid FOSS implementations of Common Lisp. I am partial to SBCL, which is derived from CMUCL, and I also like Armed Bear Common Lisp in situations where I want to use the Java virtual machine. I’m also glad that Lisp didn’t die when Lisp machines did; many people were able to migrate from Lisp machines to other platforms thanks to Common Lisp compilers.

Still, there’s something very appealing about an operating system built on top of an object-oriented environment. I’m not talking C++ or Java, but I’m talking about the types of dynamic environments made easier with Smalltalk or CLOS. There were many explorations of desktops built using dynamic objects. The closest we’ve gotten to this commercially was NeXTstep/OPENSTEP/Mac OS X, which makes heavy use of Objective-C. Étoilé, a project from the late 2000s that used GNUstep, would’ve been another interesting evolution in this direction, and I also like projects like Pragmatic Smalltalk (from Étoilé) and Objective-Smalltalk that aimed to build a Smalltalk using an Objective-C base. I also know that Microsoft’s COM tried to achieve component-based systems by trying to make a common substrate that doesn’t rely on dynamically-typed OO languages like Smalltalk and Common Lisp. Of course, neither macOS or Windows take things as far as the Smalltalk-80 environment does, and I dream of what can be created using CLOS.

But, hey, it’s not too late. A Lisp OS is my dream side project.