Every time I think of unifying various language features like this, I end up imagining that I'd just reinvent LISP and look like a fool...
That's often true within dynamically typed languages, but statically typed languages definitely don't feel Lispy. Moreover, messing with static type systems involves much more maths than hacking.
It is perfectly possible to write/use a lisp that is statically typed and still feels like a lisp. AFAIK the closest thing to this currently is shen http://www.shenlanguage.org/.
None of the things that make a lisp a lisp prevent static typing. Some common constructs could be hard to figure out the types for, but they figured out the types of transducers so I doubt it is impossible.
Consolidating the module and expression languages in 1ML will lead to even cleaner semantics. From the abstract of the Andreas Rossberg paper:
> In this “1ML”, functions, functors, and even type constructors are one and the same construct; likewise, no distinction is made between structures, records, or tuples. Or viewed the other way round, everything is just (“a mode of use of”) modules.
Haven't had a chance to look at the demo yet, but hopefully functions/records/tuples can be sugared over syntactically into something resembling traditional ML. Otherwise we might end up with something like Java where there isn't much abstraction from the underlying OO mechanism, which makes code tedious and prone to boilerplate -- eg all functions (methods) must live in a class, even just to run main.