You got me rereading R-1RK, and I was reminded again of how much I like the way Shutt connects up his design decisions to design goals and constraints. It's very in the spirit of Christopher Alexander (http://www.amazon.com/Notes-Synthesis-Form-Harvard-Paperback...).
In spite of the level of detail, kernel's design goals diverge so quickly from my own that I can't reuse any of the design work. It's really too bad.
Today's frustrating example: I really couldn't give a rat's ass that Kernel permits cyclical argument lists in operatives but not applicatives. Then in A.4 he talks about what's missing before R0RK, and the support for cycles feels pedantic next to the problem of a fast implementation. If he wasn't so concerned about handling cycles during eval perhaps the code wouldn't be slow. How the heck can a language be slower than wart?!
