Not Cliff, but I remember BLISS from early '80s Air Force work. It's the only thing I know that could beat compiled Fortran for things like signal processing. That code absolutely flew.

Oh, I did system work with BLISS - I was trying to connect a PDP-11 to a set of motors (which controlled a small telescope).

Much later, I used BLISS on a VAX/780 at Space Telescope Science Institute - making an image editor interface into VMS. Long time ago!