Project Mage is an effort to build a power-user environment in Common Lisp
Flexibility interacts poorly with composability. When everything is specialised at the whim of the developer, tying different pieces together is difficult. A lot of the rigidity in programming languages is there because it gives programmers (and programs) common ground to work from.<p>Flexibility usually interacts poorly with performance as well. Specialisation to a domain is usually faster and can be dramatically faster, but the plumbing that makes the specialisation possible has a cost everywhere.<p>I&#x27;m curious whether lisp&#x27;s macros are sufficient to splice together dissimilar code and provide the domain specific optimisations one would want to eliminate the plumbing overhead. I would expect not but it&#x27;ll be interesting to be proven wrong.<p>It&#x27;s interesting that you&#x27;re starting with the user interface instead of the sufficiently smart compiler. &quot;I&#x27;ll rebuild the world in lisp&quot; projects sometimes (usually?) stall in the first stage of writing their compiler. I think it&#x27;s quite encouraging that you&#x27;re building on an existing language implementation.<p>That would be a lot to build in five years. Good luck and happy hacking.