But it's not the pure genius of Symbolics LISP. The genius of the Lisp machines is in their extensibility and consistency all the way down. (This has nothing to do with Lisp, BTW, but rather with the design of the system and runtime. The syntax is nice, but largely irrelevant.)

The closest I've ever come to day to day use of a Lisp machine is Emacs. It is wonderfully different from "worse is better" systems like UNIX and Clojure/Java. With a few keystrokes, I can use my tool to change my tool... instantly. Everything is as deeply aware of everything else (if it needs to be). The result is an extremely comfortable environment where anything seems possible. (I recently switched from bash + ansi-term to eshell. UNIX is much nicer when you can see it through a lisp-colored shell.)

Anyway, I guess this isn't really related to the article... but if your view of programming consists of strings being passed along pipelines and huge, monolithic cathedrals that claim to be "IDEs", you are not seeing the whole picture.