[inimino]

You don't realize that Scheme used a garbage collected high level language at a time when C would have been the norm. This is like having 40000 npm dependencies today, convenient and very practical.

The smart person was Knuth, who said 97% of the time, you shouldn't think about optimizations, but you shouldn't be complacent but look out for the 3%. This is the same Knuth who gives all his code examples in MIX, the assembly language he created for this purpose.