Actually I love C as well because it gets me so close to the machine. For years I combined the two. Using Lisp for the parts that didn't need C, and then generating C from some high level spec that resolved any performance/portability issue with it. Ended up building a real-time video encoder/decoder like this. It ran in real-time and the entire process was described with very high-level algebraic syntax (s-expressions, of course ;-) which really helped in innovating the algorithms we were using.