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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

If you dig the old Xerox docs, some of them refer to Lisp as inspiration.

Also the Mesa / Cedar had a similar approach, but based on dynamic libraries, which Niklaus Wirth took great advantage on how Oberon and derived systems worked.

Incidentally, due to Rob Pikes admiration for Oberon, not only had Inferno the ACME editor from Plan 9, already influenced by how Oberon worked, the whole Limbo experience on Inferno is quite similar as well.

Unfortunately we still lack this kind of full stack OS/REPL experience on modern systems.

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I worked on a system implemented in Smalltalk for a few years, and the truly integrated development process possible in a ST is a high I've been chasing ever since. And this was in a setting that had so many things going against it: I started working on it in 2016, and the last update of the runtime environment was from '99. We had a custom HTTP client, and home-brew bindings to OpenSSL that I cooked up with some mad science Python that parsed C headers to generate Smalltalk code. I even had to fix a bug where Winsock fds rolled over if you opened more than 8k sockets, because the runtime FFI bindings assumed a 16 bit wide return value (I assume the code dates back to the Win 3.11 days).

By all rights, it should have been _awful_. But in reality we were able to iterate quickly and actually make stuff, because the technical foundations of the system were rock solid, the team was good, and because the truly integrated Smalltalk development enviroment enables a super-tight development cycle. A joke I have with a former colleague from those days is how all modern languages are still fundamentally no different from the punch card days: You take your sources off to the batch processing center, and the results come out at the other end, while Smalltalk is future techonology from the 80s.

Yeah we get glimpses of it across JVM, .NET, PowerShell, Fish and so on, but hardly as it used to be.

We do have Pharo, Allegro and such, but their spotlight opportunity is gone.

> We do have Pharo, Allegro and such, but their spotlight opportunity is gone.

Do you think the paradigm is a dead end?

In the world of commercial software, sadly yes, compare the idea of Dynabooks with the tablets that we actually got.

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