RPG's WIB said nothing about bad design. C didn't do better than lisp because it was a hack. It was an incredibly clean design, as clean as the original lisp. RPG was comparing two clean designs, and trying to describe the evolutionary properties of one that made it more fit in its environment (ie us) than the other. The biggest such property is simplicity of implementation. (Later C compilers have gotten more complex and ++, but a modern compiler wouldn't have been as competitive in an earlier world where C wasn't already adopted: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/09/23/the-milo-criterion)
RPG's WIB said nothing about bad design. C didn't do better than lisp because it was a hack. It was an incredibly clean design, as clean as the original lisp. RPG was comparing two clean designs, and trying to describe the evolutionary properties of one that made it more fit in its environment (ie us) than the other. The biggest such property is simplicity of implementation. (Later C compilers have gotten more complex and ++, but a modern compiler wouldn't have been as competitive in an earlier world where C wasn't already adopted: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/09/23/the-milo-criterion)