I am sure anyone who thinks non-trivial Common Lisp programs look like C has never written a non-trivial Common Lisp program. Why would the code look like C? Non-trivial Java, C#, JavaScript, Python, or Ruby programs don't look like C, and they have similar optimization requirements. Anyone who says C has comparable expressiveness to Common Lisp can't know what they're talking about the same way anyone who says C has comparable expressiveness to Python can't know what they're talking about.