The key to the authors point is this sentence - "One of the greatest mysteries in the history of computer language comparisons is to me the question why most pe

The key to the authors point is this sentence - "One of the greatest mysteries in the history of computer language comparisons is to me the question why most people are more interested in the relative speed of a language implementation, rather than in features like expressiveness, flexibility and orthogonality.". The author appears to believe having a lisp which ~5x-10x slower is a worthwhile tradeoff to make if the underlying lisp is simpler, more flexible and more expressive. PS: I am not suggesting that picolisp is simpler, more flexible or more expressibe.