I totally get you with Lisps and performance, but I was more talking about the beauty and elegance of code written in them. Algorithms written in Lisps seem to be pieces of art.

And that's just Lisps... having a look at logic programming languages like Prolog and Mercury, it's amazing to see just how compact yet understandable an algorithm can be. They're beautiful!

But as for performance, take a look at Mercury - its a declarative logic programming language with built in constraint solving, which compiles down to C, and its performance is great. We've rewritten some Mercury in Rust, and yes our Rust is faster, but not by orders of magnitude as you'd think.