[jgrant27]

You mention that the reason for lower performance of Lisp vs. C has to do with a lack of motivation. This couldn't be further from the truth. Have a look at the source repos for SBCL, Clozure or any other dozen Lisp implementations or dialects.

In the next paragraph you state that because Lisp does not match C in performance this somehow proves that language-design directly effects the ability for a Lisp compiler to generate optimized code comparable to generated code from a C compiler.

This is a bizarre conclusion. What is your reasoning for this ?