I didn't say "faster", I'm not claiming lisp is faster than C++, that's factually wrong. C++ is investing VERY heavily in metaprogramming since they finally figured out metaprogramming is important. Guess what, we knew this since 1960s and had an even better and elegant way of doing metaprogramming. It took ~60 years for us to realize the importance of a key feature of lisp and now we decided to make a hacked-on implementation of it. I'm personally pretty ok with C++, and it's not like this is community's fault given C++ originated from C. I'm just saying that the concept of "doing arbitrary computation in compile time" has been known since the dawn of computer science, and we had an extremely elegant and efficient way of doing it.
Starting with C, we almost achieved what lisp can do in a few thousand lines of code in, what, 20 years. I don't consider this a success, especially since C++ standard is now one of the longest, subtlest technical documents in the industry. We created a monster.
