LISP%201.5%20Programmers%20Manual. Other. Shen. Common Lisp. IDEs and Packages. Strugman. A Hacker's Introduction to Partial Evaluation. In most other programming languages, new abstractions are built by writing code on /top/ of existing abstractions.
But in lisp, its possible to build new abstractions by writing code *beneath* existing code. Abstract: A partial evaluator automatically specializes a program with respect to some of its input. This article shows how the idea comes up naturally when you write program generators by hand, then builds a basic online partial evaluation library and puts it to work transforming an interpreter into a compiler. 0.
Clojure. Lisp-based OSes. Symbolics and Lisp Machines built integrated hardware and software environments tuned to Lisp that were considered to be highly productive environments, with such merits as: The OS is (save for little bits at the bottom, and even there, it's disputable...) written in the same high level language you use to write applications.
Since virtually everything on the system is represented by Lisp objects, tools for manipulating Lisp objects can manipulate pretty much everything on the system, including the OS.