Lisp is a general-purpose language that is higher-level than C and in many ways more powerful than C. Powerful dialects of Lisp such as Common Lisp are probably much better languages for writing very large applications than is C. (Unfortunately, for many non-technical reasons C and its successor C++ have become the dominant languages for application development. These languages are both inadequate for extremely large applications, which is evidenced by the fact that newer, larger programs are becoming ever harder to write and are requiring ever more programmers despite great increases in C development environments; and by the fact that, although hardware speeds and reliability have been growing at an exponential rate, most software is still generally considered to be slow and buggy.)