"Liberating the Smalltalk lurking in C and Unix" by Stephen Kell

Thanks for the link - that looks really interesting! I will have to give it a try to make some informed statement, but I think it's definitely worth looking at. Some parts of Ruby also seem to be inspired by Smalltalk, so that might be a good fit. There's also a Smalltalk-80 VM by Rochus Keller based on the Lua JIT compiler [8] (and a very nice Qt-based Smalltalk browser), that might also go in the same direction. In general, I think there are two major interesting aspects in systems like the Ruby system browser and Smalltalk. On the one hand one can discover the system - you can dig into the implementation without using a disassembler or reverse engineering - and on the other hand it is possible to change the system behavior at runtime (though this is, of course, dangerous). I would love to see at least the discoverability aspect to be more pervasive in standard operating systems. There are already partial approaches to this, such as DTrace/systemtap and the proc filesystem, but having discoverability as a first class concept - which might fit well to Plan 9's (and to some extent Unix's) "everything is a file" approach - would be nice. The ability to change the system at runtime is also fascinating. I already mentioned the research of Stephen Kell in another comment [1] and there's a great video of one of his talks [2] in which he shows his approach to dynamically alter a program's behavior on Unix using shared library mechanisms (you can find the code on github [3]). I work

"Liberating the Smalltalk lurking in C and Unix" by Stephen Kell, Strange Loop Conference, [this video] > This talk introduces liballocs, an infrastructure which exposes the dynamism hiding in the arcane linking and debugging infrastructure of a Unix process, along with a small extension to C toolchains that enables fast dynamic access to data created by statically compiled code. Together they can be said to unleash a "hidden Smalltalk" inside the C and Unix model of programs and processes. Come prepared for a journey that takes your perceptions of the boundaries between dynamic and static languages and turns them on its head.