I liked your comment on Oberon as an example of what non-C/UNIX might look like. Your statement on language-integrated OS's implies there is a technical reason

I liked your comment on Oberon as an example of what non-C/UNIX might look like. Your statement on language-integrated OS's implies there is a technical reason they didn't make it. It's a common mistake technologists make where they think of everything in technical aspects. Business (i.e. Marketing) and social effects are far, far, more prevalent a reason for success or failure of technologies in terms of adoption. Here's four factors that will answer lots of your questions by themselves: 1. Is it free or reduces costs in some way? UNIX on minicomputers is automatically going to get adopted if its design is useful just because of massive reductions in equipment costs. 2. Is it backwards compatible and/or does it easily integrate with the established ecosystem? IBM, Microsoft, and Intel used backwards compatible to grab markets followed by lock-in. You could say Linux/BSD eventually did with them piling more stuff on the old code. OpenBSD was the exception with them ripping stuff out. Easy example of second is languages compiling to and/or using libraries from established ecosystems like C, Java, .NET, and Javascript. 3. Is it familiar? Do they understand the concepts? And do the developers, picky about syntax, see a similar syntax? This boosted C++, Java and C# over the likes of Lisp, Prolog, or Haskell. 4. Big, dominant company pushes for X to be the language for their platform. That explains most of the big ones that are compiled and Javascript. The other factors helped, though. These four factors are enough to absolutely kill Lisp and Forth machines in both commercial market and FOSS adoption. They don't make them impossible. They're just an uphill battle with a lot more work to do. We see communities such as Erlang and Haskell getting stronger despite being so different from established languages without being able to easily integrate with their ecosystems. Clojure [wisely] cheated by building the weird language on top of a massive ecosystem (Java platform). There's also projects aimed at Javascript trying to re-create the advantages of Lisp and Smalltalk. So, there's hope the integrated systems can make it either with lots of effort or (more wisely) just working with those factors instead of against them. Also, it's not a big loss anyway given only a few of these integrated OS's were attempted in a big way. Over 90% of efforts fail to go anywhere. Only a handful of attempts were made. If anything, they might still be ahead of the odds in the long run. They just gotta stop creating unnecessary obstacles for themselves.