I should also point out that I completely agree that is intrinsically difficult to design a language to have both the speed of C and the abstraction power of Lisp. That is part of why the job that Jeff Bezanson, who is largely responsible for Julia's amazing performance, has done is so incredible.

It's hard to explain until you start using it, but ubiquitous, fast, expressive multiple dispatch is a truly amazing programming paradigm. I'm not entirely sure how it hasn't been adopted as the core paradigm of any mainstream language in the past.