Of course. But efficiency is not the only important thing in the world. You can explore the world from different perspectives, not just from one. Lisp was for

Of course. But efficiency is not the only important thing in the world. You can explore the world from different perspectives, not just from one. Lisp was for a long time a very inefficient language, but also extremely important. The users of early Lisp did not care so much about efficiency, they were mainly academics after all and someone else did buy the machines they used(they did cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each). They cared about things like reusability of code, being easy to understand, not making mistakes or just exploring the new world of computers. They invented flow control directives like "cond" and later "if", "while"..., functions, lambdas, macros, program evaluation through eval(interpretation of programs), structured text(s expressions) and complex parsing, automatic reference counting, garbage collectors, closures...and so many things that we take for granted today. If you focus too much on something you become myopic to other things that are also important. And if you don't explore those other areas, you don't even know that they exist.