Given his work on Smalltalk, I suspect he means that he prefers the line between language runtime and operating system to be erased, and they be the same thing.

I disagree though. While there are benefits to that approach, I feel like language innovation would be stifled to a certain degree.

> Edit: Looking up the quote it seems to just be the person being pedantic in how they define operating systems.

What a surprise

Pragmatism beats idealism in the real world