> the fact is that if it really was that good it likely would have won in the marketplace

I don't think so, and, this being HN, I thought we all knew by now that just because the market favors something it doesn't make it better in every aspect to other virtually unknown things. Most easily identifiable examples of this are windows vs linux, gui vs cli, and point-and-click interfaces (touchscreen or mouse) vs keyboard.

The market favors what the masses favor, and the masses favor simple, intuitive interfaces with minimal learning curve. Versatility, efficiency, power and everything else that necessitates even the smallest of learning curves are all damned by the market. When's the last time we've seen an average joe read an instruction manual?

In any case, looking at Lisp OSes vs Unix OSes, there is a design dichotomy where both options have great advantages. Anyone correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand Lisp OSes chose to have the whole OS work in a single high-level language, which allows a very natural coupling between programs, basically destroying the distiction between whole programs and program functions. On the other hand, Unix OSes chose to have a very unassuming framework for programs that would best support a great diversity of programming languages so that they could best interoperate despite the fact that they could work via very different semantics. This structure, as we all know, consists around the semantics of files which could be thought of as global variables, plain text arguments as very unassumming (untyped and with no predefined arity) function call arguments, standard input, output, and error as lazily-evaluated function arguments, and environment variables which could be thought as dynamically-scoped variables.

I don't know exactly why Unix won over Lisp, but I could guess that it was because people favored language diversity or even just being able to stick to the language they already knew over having to learn Lisp.

I must say, though, I'm very interested in how Lisp OSes took advantage of this monolanguage property of theirs. I think I remember hearing that when an error (an exception) ocurred in any applicacion, the system could open the exact line that raised the error in an editor, allowing one to edit the source and load the modifications while the program is still running. That's just impossible in Unix by design and sounds super exciting. It would be totally useless for an average computer user of today, though. Maybe if the average computer user were a programmer they could see the value, but we all know that's never going to happen. In the beginning all users were programmers and administrators, but as the masses also became users, the administrators are now a minority and the programmers even more so. Such technology like Lisp OSes favor programmers and that's their sin in the market.

That was then, though. Now, the real obstacle for Lisp OSes, more so than them favoring a minority, is that we've built a shitload of stuff on top of Window and Linux. How much work would it be to port Chrome or Firefox (both of which are like OSes on their own) to a Lisp OS? Not to mention the other loads of apps that people depend on for their work.

That reminds me, you know how much people bitch about not being able to work because they can't find buttons with specific drawings when offered LibreOffice instead of MS Office? There's lots more to the market than it choosing solely based on quality. The software market is really depressing at times.

> Nostalgia is a powerful agent of deception.

I wasn't alive when Lisp machines were a thing, so no nostalgia applies to me here.