the truth is, we don't care. We want innovation, but hard problems are... well... hard. I've been working on a project with the same goals as Viewpoint's for over 12 years, and getting attention or support has been almost impossible.
I initially put a caveat on my comment and then removed it -- and it admitted that I haven't been very public about the work. The attention and support would definitely be better if I published on Lambda, for example.
I didn't mean to moan about my project; I wanted to moan about lack of interest in the problem. For example, where my work has been publicized, the problem itself hasn't received much in the way of interest. Even the Ph.D. students who have worked on it have said, "But [Lisp/Smalltalk/Java(I'm sadly not joking here)/etc.] does everything you need to do." I shouldn't be surprised; there's no one to blame here but human nature. But I'm still occasionally frustrated. Of course, if you're interested in my project, my email is in my profile.
You must be talking to the wrong people. In my experience, when given the liberty, people tend to approach problems with either "let's solve this!" and "how can we solve this?". The former focuses on getting it done, the latter - on what the best process of getting it done is. Neither is superior, but the latter is who is interested in this stuff.
It's not just name dropping. While I appreciate the extra links, they do very little to put the project in context or explain why we should care. Alan Kay isn't just a big name, he's also a good essayist. While light on technical details, his articles are what prompted me to go out and learn more about FoNC and COLA.
Hard to believe this hasn't been posted before; I was just reading a few of their publications (http://vpri.org/html/words_links/articles_ifnct.php) recently. There's some great stuff in there. The STEPS tech report is great reading, and the reusable objects paper is pretty neat too.
His point about the expressiveness of today's systems is a very good one, and there are other interesting examples to back it up.
BeOS/Haiku could fit an entire OS with full-featured desktop environment into well under 150 Megabytes. There are also various small linux distros. The Symbolics Lisp Machines are another example of this. I don't know how large the installed OS was, but a friend who used to work for Symbolics told me that on many occasions, customers of Symbolics would have their jaws drop when they were told that the entire developer team had only 8 or so programmers.
The fact that it takes upwards of 4 gigabytes to store the code for a "modern" OS and applications indicates there is a lot of room for improvement.
("Modern" really means kernel from the 70's plus window management and GUIs from the 80's.)
The installed OS on the Symbolics machine was only a few hundred megs, from long-vague memory. Much of that was a huge set of documentation.
I would venture to say that the MIT AI/Symbolics Lisp machine development crew (Rick Greenblatt, Dave Moon, Howard Cannon, Mike McMahon, Daniel Weinreb, sometimes RMS, and a not-too-large cast of others) probably developed the most powerful operating system (written entirely in Lisp), compressed over the shortest time period in history for any comparable project. I don't think the tools they developed, and were using for their own further development, have been equalled since. (Which is kind of sad, in a way.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLA_(software_architecture)
http://piumarta.com/software/cola/
http://piumarta.com/software/cola/coke.html
Crazy neat stuff!