>>24the aforementioned fact you don't actually know what is going on at the hardware level.
well yeah, if you want to know shit at the hardware level (like when you write cryptographic code that needs constant time execution) then you don't use a functional high level language like common lisp but assembly. the problem here is that x86 assembly doesn't guarantee that.
also, I wouldn't say that common lisp is everywhere. OOP is a dominant paradigm, functional is much less widespread nowadays. but that really has nothing to do with the thread because we're comparing processor architectures, not programming languages.