I think there's a separate Lisp lineage anyway, wherein someone in the 1960s wrote a minimal machine-code interpreter, and ever since lispers have been writing

I think there's a separate Lisp lineage anyway, wherein someone in the 1960s wrote a minimal machine-code interpreter, and ever since lispers have been writing interpreters on top of other Lisps and revising them to emit compiled code along the way. We would still have Lisp compilers if C never existed.