Z:gnu-www-ja-rms-lisp--85dcac-We started putting in rather s/en

We started putting in rather sophisticated facilities, all with the ugliest syntax you could ever think of, and it worked &mdash; people were able to write large programs in it anyway. The obvious lesson was that a language like TECO, which wasn't designed to be a programming language, was the wrong way to go. The language that you build your extensions on shouldn't be thought of as a programming language in afterthought; it should be designed as a programming language. In fact, we discovered that the best programming language for that purpose was Lisp.