It's such a shame, but "Kernel" and "Oh" sort of drives home the fact that good ideas also need good marketing to propagate. "Oh!" is also a poster child for "videos suck for searchability and discoverability--post a transcript and your slides."
It's particularly bad with "Oh" because he has some truly nifty hacks. The pipeline that is reconfiguring itself as a filter while it's filtering is stunning. The "Transmit the code in one place and execute it in another" is also clever.
The thing that dragged me to Kernel was that I needed a small language to be able to debug embedded systems on the fly. So, the interpreter couldn't be hamstrung and I never had a compile step available. I needed both small code and small data.
Kernel, the idea, fits the bill. Kernel, the implementations, for some reason all really obscure the point for reasons I'm not particularly clear on.
Maybe once I've got it all clear in my head, I'll try to do an implementation in Rust. That should help keep things clean since you can't rely on "metacircular" tricks to implement things.
I'd love to chat more about it. Email address in my profile. I spent a few years getting inspired by Kernel when I built my fexpr-based Lisp: http://akkartik.name/post/wart So I'd be happy to answer questions as you have them. Perhaps we can pore over Shutt's dissertation together.
Thanks for showing me Oh! It really has f-exprs?! I didn't immediately see it in https://github.com/michaelmacinnis/oh/blob/main/doc/manual.m...