> You don't program your computer with LISP or Smalltalk. Your computer runs a separate LISP or Smalltalk computer that you can then program on its own terms an

> You don't program your computer with LISP or Smalltalk. Your computer runs a separate LISP or Smalltalk computer that you can then program on its own terms and in its own world. That’s not really true of all Lisps! Common Lisp may be compiled straight down to assembly (that’s what SBCL does). It can call straight out to the host OS, just like a C program. Now, due to things like garbage collection you have to manage things a bit at the edges, but that’s no different from a language like Go, and I think that no-one would say that Go is its own machine. It’s true of some Lisps, such as Emacs Lisp. Emacs is really a virtual Lisp machine with an editor as a shell. I think that it’s also true of Smalltalk.