Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like that the "sufficiently complicated" part bothered you, but not the "ad hoc", "informally-specified", "bug-ridden", or "slow" parts.
No, I think it's pretty fair. One could argue about these, but except for "slow" these are more quality qualifiers, rather than quantity. So you either agree it's "bug-ridden" or not (i.e. the number and seriousness of bugs in it is negligible by whatever standards). And I think even "slow" can be discussed in the same manner, the actual speed is quantitative, of course, but in the end one either argues that this spe…
I think what makes it work is that Common Lisp very quickly becomes a faster way to do things because of how insanely efficient it is.