And then we'd have had people writing applications that Lisp isn't suited for complaining at what could have been if only we'd gone with a simple register architecture. Don't get me wrong - I believe in owning the whole stack, and I'd love to see some Lisp machines. I fully believe that something like this may reappear in the future. But let's not kid ourselves: none of these singular visions of simplicity is going to be good enough for everything.
It's not necessarily the case that Lisp machines would be the only way. I'd think more like what Intel is doing these days, adding instructions to SSE to speed up things like string processing.
