Dennis Ritchie loved LISP

I found a pretty neat interview of the 3 creators of C, C++, and Java from the year 2000. http://www.gotw.ca/publications/c_family_interview.htm

When asked if there was a language that was the best for every situation, he replied with a simple 'No, that's silly'. When asked what other languages beside C he likes best, he said he admires languages like LISP. Overall he was very humble and concise.

Why do you dislike Dennis?

>>24
A Lisp Machine's CPU's instruction set is in some ways similar to that of modern VMs' instruction sets (JVM, .NET CIL), thus high-level languages would obtain optimal speed on such architectures. There is a C compiler for Lisp Machines (written in Lisp, of course, although not CL, but a LispM dialect) and it compiles to some crude Lisp which compiles rather straightforwardly to the machine's language (which is high-level enough that it can be decompiled). So no, you would be wrong. Even if you had the compiler output directly to assembly, it would still be somewhat wrong as the memory architecture was designed around (type)tagged data, which doesn't make it C's best friend. On modern machines, such as the x86, C performs best as such machines were designed with C in mind. Turing completeness may let you implement any language in another, but that doesn't mean that some languages are native/near-native to an architecture, and other languages would incur more overhead.