ah your siding on the lisp machine vs todays hardware arch. I think if the lisp hardware architecture has significant advantages we`ll see that emerging in "soft cpu`s" on fpga`s. Particularly as the Xeon/FPGA gear gathers steam.
Also, I've seen some of these benefits of Genera in modern stacks but I still don't have all of these capabilities:
http://www.symbolics-dks.com/Genera-why-1.htm
Any jump out at you as particularly awesome for a developer OS?
Intel MPX, CHERI are just two modern approaches of reusing those ideas to tame C's memory issues.
Going back to FPGAs, I think function composition is very similar to digital circuit design, so FP concepts could be a very nice way to do GPGPU programming instead of the actual mainstream approaches. But it would require the GPU to be more FPGAs like.