apparently if you take smalltalk or a lisp dialect, cut the performance by an order of magnitude, remove most of the really interesting metaprogramming features (leaving pretty much just a crass eval function), and all of the awesome interactivity and incremental development functionality that make systems like Squeak and SLIME such a joy to use, and finish by making it vaguely line-oriented, you get a language that makes people go gaga.

go figure.