Seen complaints about startups which are obviously saving passwords in plaintext? Imagine how much worse it would be if all the "why you shouldn't it that way" criticism was consigned to obscure blogs rather than here. I regard this as that kind of problem--huge long-term drawbacks that people don't proactively go looking into and don't immediately deter implementing the idea.

If you want something done then you need to start on it yourself. Disregarding what QuickLisp has accomplished because you have to deal with more than one package management system is trollish. You'll probably want to start by designing a plugin framework that can support multiple versions of any given language. Also need to be able to bundle dependencies per application, on any operating system, so that you don't pollute the global package space for any one given application under developement. kthx

That seems better reasoned - you could expand on it and explain why this is a problem, how it should be avoided, how language packages should be integrated with system packages, etc. That would make for very interesting reading.

I'm wondering if a 'new' age of sysadmin is coming along that will basically build a vm-image of an application node, with the OS built using chef/puppet/etc, so that the host packages are as few as possible. Just a thought.