The exploratory or malleable environment had its day, and as described in the post could come back. The most successful (and they ultimately failed) were the Xerox PARC D-machines (dependents of the Alto) and the MIT Lisp machines (later sold by Symbolics, LMI, and others). I was at both institutions and used both kinds of machines for years.

All of these machines booted into an environment that had OS, networking, windowing etc in a single address space (where your software ran too). The D-machines booted into Smalltalk, Interlisp, or Cedar/Mesa environments. All were deeply networked: they didn’t have local file systems, for example.

The downside of these environments was the complete lack of security: not just the old password situation but a bug could bring the whole system down (OTOH whem so,etching went wrong you immediately entered the debugger with all state in place, sort of like ITS. No core dumps). Then you could just reboot of course. Commonly, people would just save their entire memory image and restart it later; I worked with one person who had been using the same memory image (saving it each day) for years.

Nowadays we can do more sophisticated things than we could 40 years ago. Maybe a machine that boots into a polyglot interpreter for Python, JS, C++, that also took compiled code.

I’ve never been as productive as the years I worked on then lispm. LLMS would have supercharged it…but they didn’t exist: we were working on AI back then!