> Unix and C are brilliant pieces of work

I beg to differ:

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/handbook.html

> pipes, scripting C programs, etc.

None of these things are necessary when every piece of information on your machine lives in a Lisp world image. As it should. And would, if the machines we are now using were the descendants of real computers, rather than of early-1980s children's toys.

I'm sure you saw this coming but:

http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

"None of these things are necessary when every piece of information on your machine lives in a Lisp world image."

http://www.bobcongdon.net/blog/2004/06/boil-ocean.html

"Worse is Worse."

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=24807

And your last link would be applicable, save for the "ocean" actually having been "boiled" in this manner. The Lisp Machine existed. You cannot un-create it. It proves that all of the supposedly impossible or impractical pipe dreams of the Unix haters are in fact possible.

"The fact that C produced faster code, was easier to master, was easier to use in groups, and ran well on less expensive hardware were not considerations that Gabriel found important. But others did. On those metrics, the dominance of C as a programming language was an example of better is better, not worse is better."

So, C is better than Lisp, depending on your metrics.

As for the ocean, it is no longer the machine on which you are typing your program. It is all of the information, data, and code available to you on Internet. That's a lot of ocean to boil. Any Lisp needs to work well with as much of it as possible to be considered a useful language today.

> C is better than Lisp, depending on your metrics.

A camel is also a better vehicle than a truck, depending on your metrics. (Quite seriously.)