There have been various suggestions over the years: LispOS, Tunes, Loper. There have even been some sucesses: Movitz, Mezzano. A few years back, I managed to

There have been various suggestions over the years: LispOS, Tunes, Loper. There have even been some sucesses: Movitz, Mezzano. A few years back, I managed to get a Lisp interpreter written in x86 assembly language reading from a floppy and running on the bare metal on an old 32-bit laptop. I think the leading edge has moved on from Lisp Machines, but as the mainstream took a wrong turning a long time ago, that still has a long way to catch up. For me, the hot topics in system design are capability-based security, dependent types, and live programming. My "dream" is to have a statically typed Lisp (with type inference) running on commodity hardware (x64), and either compiling to the bare metal (faster) or to byte code (smaller, less work, and portable). This would be image-based, so no file system would be necessary, and have a single-address space, so you could treat the entire internet as if it were part of your machine's memory. It would have a structure editor instead of an Emacs variant. This is probably more than I'll ever have time to do. I have implemented my own Lisp dialect (which could form the basis of the system proposed above), and am using it to develop a visual dataflow programming language (http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/fmj/FMJ.html http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/fmj/FMJ.html). Many here and elsewhere are skeptical of the value of this, but I'm convinced it's the right thing. My short-term goal is to add dependent types to the new language.