> That 'thin' scripting layer has been used to program some pretty impressive stuff in the engineering and architectural world.

Yes, I've seen people work wonders with AutoLisp. There was - probably still is - an application used for designing clothes. The designer creates, I think, a "size 8" and a lisp script generates the other sizes.

AutoLisp being lisp-like is really a happy accident. The Autodeskers chose Xlisp IIRC because it was free and embeddable. If they could have embedded a C-like language interpreter, they would have.

In fact later, AutoDesk introduced other languages and tried to push users onto them. But AutoLisp already had huge momentum.