I'm not a big Lisp fanboy, but I wonder why it wasn't considered an option for at least bootstrapping the compiler? I think even if no Lisp was available on their machines that hand coding one in assembly and then using that would have been much faster than other options (note: it's been 20+ years since my college Programming Languages class (where ironically I built a Lisp-1 in Pascal) so I may be mis-remebering my programming language history here)