The industry has gone beyond “catching up” to surpassing the values of the Lisp Machine and Genera. Any grand ideas of this era have been considered, and either mined, reimplemented, and exploited or simply rejected as being past their time.
The lack of a Lisp machine or environment like Genera is not holding Lisp (much less the entire modern family of Lisp-y languages) back. And modern IDEs are off the charts, even if they don’t check every single box of what Genera has to offer.
As an industry, we’ve not just stood on the shoulders of giants of the past like Genera, we’ve stepped off and up and moved ahead.
I’ve seen the Genera image that’s floating around, it ran in a VM of some kind. There’s a couple YouTube videos of demonstrations, and maybe I’ve seen the wrong ones, but I’ve just seen them as interesting but not necessarily compelling. It would be wonderful to see a thorough review from a modern perspective.
And, yea, they should set the system free. It’s pushing 50 years old, and we’re in “internet” time, so who knows how much that is in “No one knows you’re a dog” years.