Ramakrishnan's website

Just thinking aloud. I used to think that C is a “general purpose” programming language and languages like lisp are “application specific” high level languages. Obviously, this was because of my ignorance and lack of thinking.

I now feel the exact opposite. C being a glorified assembly language with poor support for higher level data structures, is a language intended for low level programming and languages like Lisp with its rich support for data structures and extensibility with macros is the real general purpose language. For proof, see the kind of things Common Lisp allows you to do with the “numbers” for instance. The C library itself does not seem to have all those facilities, though it has some of those facilities. One can argue that C allows one to implement all those features, but that is not the point.