Since the GNU project is celebrating its anniversary, and the initial announcement for GNU is linked to (http://www.gnu.org/gnu/initial-announcement.en.html) all over the place, I reread it and I stumbled upon the plan for a lisp-based window system:
and eventually a Lisp-based window system through which several Lisp programs and ordinary Unix programs can share a screen.
It is well known that Stallman had a lisp background and has launched lisp-based projects (Emacs, Guile). As I understand, Stallman’s preferred desktop environment for the GNU system is nowadays GNUstep (which seems to be a little dormant).
When looking at demonstrations of Symbolics Lisp machines, I am really impressed by the powerful approach and I think that Stallman had something like this in mind during the announcement.
So I wonder: What happened to this plan of a Lisp-based window system? Has it been actually pursued once?
Nothing happened.
The main reason is that Stallman grossly overestimated the amount of help he was going to get from other developers, so his plans were, correspondingly, grandiose.
In fact, the first generally useful GNU systems did not become available for 10 years (until the Linux kernel became usable for a non-hacker user). This lead to the sarcastic expansion of GNU as “Generally Not Used/Useful/Usable”.
The closest were, I guess, two window managers: a lisp-based one gwm and a scheme-based one scwm, neither of which actually GNU projects.
Nothing Will Happen
One has also to take into account that the X Window system made an enormous progress in the last 30 years, and became very much entrenched, so replacing it with something only slightly better – but incompatible – is not really an option.
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