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http://funcall.blogspot.be/2009/03/i-hate-lisp.html
In the middle of the course we started learning about a new language: Lisp. We started learning how Lisp was implemented in Macro-11. It was idiotic. Lisp apparently had no notion of ‘memory’ at all, let alone data structures like strings or tables. Everything seemed to be assembled out of long, long chains of pointers, and the Macro-11 programs we wrote spent most of their time rummaging around these pointer chains trying to find *some* data *somewhere*. We wrote routines in Macro-11 that did MEMQ and ASSQ and GETPROP (for some weird reason Lisp had these ‘symbols’ that had ‘properties’, but it sure was a chore to get at the properties).
Furthermore, it seemed that Lisp encouraged the use of really inefficient coding practices. It was often the case that our subroutines would call other subroutines or even call themselves. I had no conceptual problem with a subroutine calling itself (except that it was a blatant violation of the all important ‘Un-Cuteness Principle’), but every function call ate up a chunk of stack, and that put a limit on how many function calls you could do.
It was obvious to me that Lisp was invented by some bozo that clearly didn't understand how computers actually worked. Why would someone lookup a value in a property list when you could write a simple routine in Macro-11 that would find the value in a table? The assembly code was much faster, the table was much more compact, and you could avoid these endless chains of pointers. Assuming you were dumb enough to put your data in a property list, you really couldn't use a very big property list without worrying about the stack depth. This just wasn't an issue with a linear table in assembly code.