I agree with you, but perhaps you are reading “tight” slightly differently than the way the original poster intended it? To me, ANSI C is “tight” in the sense

I agree with you, but perhaps you are reading “tight” slightly differently than the way the original poster intended it? To me, ANSI C is “tight” in the sense that it is made up of a small set of features, which can be used together to get a lot done. But the design of the features, as they relate to each other, can feel somewhat inelegant. Those different features aren’t unified by a Simple Big Idea in the way that they are in Lisp or Smalltalk. Lisp and Smalltalk, then, have “tight” designs (everything is an s-expression/everything is an object) which result in minimal, consistent semantics. But they also have kitchen sink standard libraries that can be challenging to learn. (Although to be fair, Smalltalk (and maybe Common Lisp to a lesser extent) was envisioned as effectively your whole OS, and arguably it is a “tighter” OS + dev environment than Unix + C...) FWIW, I am learning Scheme because it seems to be “tight” in both senses.