I don’t use Lisp; I’m not a fan of Lisp itself. I am a fan of what Lisp lets you do which C does not: take an existing language and make it into a better one; one that serves your needs, not the assumptions of its creators.
Whereas I have and do use C. And I constantly lament the utter uselessness of C’s macro system, which makes it impossible to reshape or improve C as a language in any way that counts.
You see, I don’t actually have a problem with C’s minimal interest in safety or high-level expressibility. It was after all built to do a very constrained, low-level, one-time job: implement a kernel, where safe program execution may reasonably be considered the expert implementor’s responsibility. I do have a problem with not being able to extend C into a safe high-level one; not that that’s stopped millions of know-it-all C weenies such as [presumably] yourself taking it and mashing it into domains it is ill suited for (high-level applications programming).
..
You’re all so proud of the monster you’ve built; so when your C program eats your users’ data because a buffer blew or a pointer dangled, well that’s their tough luck, isn’t it. Not your problem for using an inherently, unfixably, unsafe tool in the first place. And definitely not C’s for not being capable of raising itself up, only dragging everyone else down.
’Cos let’s not pretend these dumbshit foot guns of yours don’t have a very valid use: keeping the dumb outsider riff-raff like me out of your private personal playground. Alas, I’m an exceptionally persistent SOB: I may despise writing code, and loathe the lousy languages you lot provide to do it, but I absolutely love the solutions I provide despite all those barriers you put in my way, and my users love them too—and that is the only judgement that counts.
That I happen to evolve new languages and develop deeper insights into a culture and philosophy of language design that is both utterly alien and utterly above and beyond you, well, yes, you got me there: I am feeling a tad smug about that right now. But only cos you’re being a reactionary dick. I went down that route not to be clever or superior, but because it was the only way I could hope to solve the problems I’ve got using the very limited wetware tools I have. And it worked.
So maybe try humility sometime, and realize that all your C languages, for all their popularity and influence, are but one tiny, samey, undistinguished facet in a whole vast rich infinitely colored world of computational thinking of which I know just a little and you know nothing at all. And then get back to me; who knows, we might even have something positive to talk about.