I don't think a Lisp machine would make much sense these days, as far as the hardware is concerned. Designing and building CPUs is very expensive, and the small

I don't think a Lisp machine would make much sense these days, as far as the hardware is concerned. Designing and building CPUs is very expensive, and the small market for such a machine would make them prohibitively expensive. But an operating system built around the idea could be quite interesting. From what I know, the systems running on the Lisp machines of the 1980s were nightmares from a modern security perspective. But the idea of having a closely integrated development-runtime-environment centered around Lisp is appealing, I think. Except that building an OS from scratch is a lot of work, at least if you want to support a reasonable range of hardware. But maybe you do not even need that. Now that I think of it, one might build a desktop environment for a modern Unix-ish system that aims to reproduce the Lisp machine development environment of the olden days. This would also allow one to harness the existing Lisp implementations. Does anyone know of such a project?