"We 've painted a dim picture of what it takes to bring IPEs to UNIX. The problems of locating. user interfaces. system seamlessness. and incrementality are hard to solve for current UNIXes--but not impossible. One of the reasons so little attention has been paid to the needs of IPEs in UNIX is that
UNIX had not had good examples of IPEs for inspiration. This is changing: for instance. one of this article's authors has helped to develop the Small talk IPE for UNIX (see the adjacent story). and two others of us are working to make the Cedar IPE available on UNIX.
What's more. new UNIX facilities. such as shared memory and lightweight processes (threads). go a long way toward enabling seamless integration. Of course. these features don't themselves deliver integration: that takes UNIX programmers shaping UNIX as they always have--in the context of a friendly and cooperative community. As more UNIX programmers come to know IPEs and their
power. UNIX itself will inevitably evolve toward being a full IPE. And then UNIX programmers can have what Lisp and Small talk and Cedar programmers have had for many years: a truly comfortable place to program."
Unix, Plan 9 and the Lurking Smalltalk
https://www.humprog.org/~stephen/research/papers/kell19unix-...
Late binding is a bit out of fashion these days but it really brings a lot of cool benefits for composition.