[erlang-questions] Why do we need modules at all?

[jm]

On 25/05/11 2:51 PM, Richard O'Keefe wrote:
>
> Back in the early days of the language Pop, the people at
> the Edinburgh AI department had a game.  The whole machine
> they were using was programmed in Pop, on top of bare metal.
> The game goes like this:
>      how much of the system can you zap before you have
>      to reboot the machine?
>
> How much of a shared sea-of-functions can you update before
> having to revert to backups?
>

This is an aside, but one of those things I've been wondering about.

  Is there a language in existence which scales from "here's a piece of 
bare metal" and scales up to declarative distributed programming of the 
likes of Erlang? At the moment, it seems that the accepted way is to 
change from assembler to C to something else. Is there a language that 
progresses from the low level machine code basics up by adding language 
features and improving the runtime environment which is written in 
itself, ie turtles all the way down, and is more than an AST written in 
ascii (I'm looking at you lisp)?

Jeff.