This is exactly the attitude as to why Lisps don't, and for at least the near-term future won't, be used outside of tiny niches of computer-priesthoods. C was used because that's what the coder is most comfortable working in. Had he wanted to, he almost certainly could have used the regex to convert the code into Lisp, or Fortran, or Smalltalk, but he'd be getting rid of the advantages C has for his intended use cases, such as interoperability with a large amount of other software. If you want to stop complaining why your favorite language gets no respect, start learning from C and make it easier to dip one's toe into the language instead of complaining about a language's purity of essence.