>>8
Dude, I could make C dance the cha-cha on an abacus. I write code in it all the time. I did it for almost a decade before entering university.
But, every Lisp weenie I've ever seen knew C inside out. C is an easy language. It doesn't take much brainpower to use it. The problem is that few C hackers have used Lisp, which means they've missed out on a huge pool of knowledge.
Here, let me put it to you in different terms: what would you rather have as a general sorting routine, a 1337 bubblesort in zOMG pure 100% x86 asm, or quicksort in a slower language?
Do you get where I'm going with this? The Lisp bunch pretty much breathe algorithms. While some C hacker is toiling away to microoptimize a poor algorithm, the Lisp weenie goes to take a shit, throws together some algorithm with superior time complexity while squatting away, then comes back and writes it in under an hour.