I had a dream once that a coworker had discovered, and was trying to understand a mission-critical system running on an old, unusual computer. "Maybe bitwize ca

I had a dream once that a coworker had discovered, and was trying to understand a mission-critical system running on an old, unusual computer. "Maybe bitwize can help us out here," she said. "This certainly looks like his kind of thing." So I went over. The computer was a kind of Lisp machine. It had an ordinary CPU, but custom firmware and an unusual boot process: A very small, binary microkernel provided enough of a Lisp environment to bootstrap the rest of the system which, for security reasons, was streamed in in source form over a UART via an attached, dedicated computer (something small like an Arduino). You could literally watch it initialize first the device drivers, then the file systems and network stack, and finally bring up a window system with a decently modern GUI, all by evaluating streamed-in Lisp source, after which the application -- a service that handled arcane business logic for some obscure but important corner of our company -- was loaded and run. I managed to get an editor running and opened the source code of the OS. It was one of the most straightforward, beautiful pieces of code I'd ever seen. Tremendous power could be afforded the user in inspiringly few lines of code, yet still be completely readable and understandable. Shortly after having this dream I discovered GNU Mes, an attempt to bootstrap the entire GNU universe using a Scheme interpreter and a C compiler that can mutually bootstrap each other.