1. Allen Newell at CMU AI built a system called Lstar that was only for "Greenspuning", it was a language for bootstrapping up higher languages. It's very hard now to find even a mention of this on Google. This was decades ago.
2. I recently have been spending time learning and using the Go language from Google. It has almost no facilities for booting new languages. Nowadays that's called building a DSL. The thing is, Go is very useful, efficient, and easy to learn. Plus, it has an excellent system for concurrent and parallel programming. They explicitly decided against building in facilities for DSLs, as they are seen as making systems hard to understand.
Alan Kay wasn't wrong, he had a particular point of view. To me, today, Kay's view seems old-fashioned compared to Go. Both Go and Kay's OOP are very sophisticated. In very different ways.
Just a personal view, but my feeling about Lisp and SmallTalk is that they have opposing views of DSLs. Lisp culture seems to celebrate "bottom-up programming," While SmallTalk seems to celebrate writing programs that are unmistakably SmallTalk.
I guess that Smalltalk also likes bottom-up programming, but it does not meta-level or language-level programming often in an object-oriented way. Lisp might do that too, but it often puts other interfaces on top. CLOS is an example: CLOS is itself an object-oriented system (see AMOP), but on top are functional and descriptive (macro) layers.
2. I recently have been spending time learning and using the Go language from Google. It has almost no facilities for booting new languages. Nowadays that's called building a DSL. The thing is, Go is very useful, efficient, and easy to learn. Plus, it has an excellent system for concurrent and parallel programming. They explicitly decided against building in facilities for DSLs, as they are seen as making systems hard to understand.
Alan Kay wasn't wrong, he had a particular point of view. To me, today, Kay's view seems old-fashioned compared to Go. Both Go and Kay's OOP are very sophisticated. In very different ways.