That's true. It would be nice for a true alternative. I still think about it from time-to-time. My Scheme project was to be a SchemeOS. It wasn't even the sheer amount of work that got to me, and ultimately did it in. It was the realization that I'd have to go it completely alone.
I was a lurker for years when the TUNES project was going on. I won't say a new "from scratch" OS is impossible, but I will say that TUNES ended up with a death by a thousand bike sheds. Linux worked thanks to POSIX and other *ix systems in existence. The groundwork was there. There was a model. Anyone that wanted to contribute knew what a Unix looked like and how a Unix functioned.
Not so with any LispOS. Or TUNES. It's a new thing, wholly different from anything that existed before. The few people that had access to Genera weren't going to want to replicate that for reasons that become apparent when using it (it's quite outmoded in many ways). And since there was no Genera community and nothing to really salvage there, it made more sense to start over anyway.
With all that said, I believe the true appeal of a LispOS is that it's homogeneous. It's Lisp from top-to-bottom. Which means it's great for programming at any level, great for productivity. But not so great for people that love variety in languages.
I was a lurker for years when the TUNES project was going on. I won't say a new "from scratch" OS is impossible, but I will say that TUNES ended up with a death by a thousand bike sheds. Linux worked thanks to POSIX and other *ix systems in existence. The groundwork was there. There was a model. Anyone that wanted to contribute knew what a Unix looked like and how a Unix functioned.
Not so with any LispOS. Or TUNES. It's a new thing, wholly different from anything that existed before. The few people that had access to Genera weren't going to want to replicate that for reasons that become apparent when using it (it's quite outmoded in many ways). And since there was no Genera community and nothing to really salvage there, it made more sense to start over anyway.
With all that said, I believe the true appeal of a LispOS is that it's homogeneous. It's Lisp from top-to-bottom. Which means it's great for programming at any level, great for productivity. But not so great for people that love variety in languages.