Yes, I read your article. I think I understand where you're coming from, but it's completely circular. All you need to do is create another mostly impermeable strata. People do this all the time, and it has been wildly successful so far.

In that sense, original foundations don't matter. But, of course, they do, 'cause you had to build a new strata, right? Round and round...

And, in the passing of time, you can simply replace the underlying foundations with something more unified. This, again, happens all the time. CPUs gain SIMD instructions and new addressing modes, VM support, etc. I fully expect, while nothing like DESCRIPTOR, more hardware support for higher level GC to come if its worth is proven.

The input device remark was probably a poor analogy, but it is somewhat similar. "Input devices matter". Well, duh, yeah. But it certainly is not a good summary of an argument to replace the mouse and keyboard with an generalized gesture recognition device. :-) The mouse was an addition to the keyboard, not a reconstruction of it. If we find that, say, speech is better at some things, we don't propose to take away everything else. We build on top, because, while it may offend the sensibilities of some -- you can fix the warts later.

You're right to say that we're all working on huge 8bit micros to an extent -- but beyond the historical implications, it's circular to think that really matters. It's why Alan Kay now sounds like a grumpy old man, as Raskin does, as most people who moan about lisp machines and the DESCRIPTOR architecture. Today, I can run emulations of these things far, far faster than the originals and the software on my box is far more capable than the software people were using then. The real world favors cutting away/polishing a turd into a smooth stone, not piling up someone's perfect diamonds -- because restarting from scratch every time you discover something new is wasted work.