I think the author is misremembering Wolfram's claims. I recall attending the first open demo of SMP, where Wolfram (and I think co-author Chris Cole) were demoing it in a large Caltech lecture hall. Here's what I recall.
They had tried to use Macsyma for their physics work, and found experimentally that it was too slow on what they considered to be "medium" problems, and could not handle "large" problems at all. They were trying to do things that were pushing the limits, and pushing them hard, of what could be done on the hardware of the day [1].
They showed some benchmarks comparing SMP to Macsyma using the kind of problems that had arisen in their physics research. For "small" problems, SMP was a bit faster. Maybe 2 or 3 times or so faster.
For "medium" problems, it was 100 times faster.
And it could do "large" problems.
I don't think I ever heard Wolfram say anything about Lisp being 100 times slower than C in general. I only heard claims like that when he was talking specifically about building systems like SMP, and was comparing basing such systems on top of a general purpose high level language (Lisp) vs. basing them on something built and optimized specifically to support a system like SMP.
[1] The SMP work was done on CITHEP's (Caltech High Energy Physics) VAX 11/780. I was an undergrad at Caltech at the time, working part time at CITHEP as a system programmer and admin, so knew many people involved in SMP development and got to watch it as it progressed, and then was put into production by working physicists.
In high energy physics people compute scattering amplitudes, the goal is to estimate how many events of a particular kind a detector in a collider experiment will see at various energies. The predominant tool for doing that is to calculate contributions from so called Feynman diagrams, each diagram is a graphical representation of some fairly complicated integral, the integrant is some rational function of the particle momenta. The nominator has to be simplified by manipulating spinor identities and in the case of for example QCD one has to work out color factors. Just a few years before people were computing 1000s of those diagrams by hand for Quantum electro dynamics, often while cross checking each others results. For non-abelian Yang-Mills Theory (t'Hooft Veltman had published their landmark paper in 1972) this is more or less infeasible beyond first order.
The number of diagrams that have to be evaluated quickly explodes beyond the first order and in the case of QCD already at two loops would require herculean efforts to do by hand. In fact Schoonschip was one of the first computer algebra systems and developed for just this reason.
Beyond that areas like Supersymmetry and certain parts of General Relativity would be very painful to work in, if everything had to be done by hand.
They had tried to use Macsyma for their physics work, and found experimentally that it was too slow on what they considered to be "medium" problems, and could not handle "large" problems at all. They were trying to do things that were pushing the limits, and pushing them hard, of what could be done on the hardware of the day [1].
They showed some benchmarks comparing SMP to Macsyma using the kind of problems that had arisen in their physics research. For "small" problems, SMP was a bit faster. Maybe 2 or 3 times or so faster.
For "medium" problems, it was 100 times faster.
And it could do "large" problems.
I don't think I ever heard Wolfram say anything about Lisp being 100 times slower than C in general. I only heard claims like that when he was talking specifically about building systems like SMP, and was comparing basing such systems on top of a general purpose high level language (Lisp) vs. basing them on something built and optimized specifically to support a system like SMP.
[1] The SMP work was done on CITHEP's (Caltech High Energy Physics) VAX 11/780. I was an undergrad at Caltech at the time, working part time at CITHEP as a system programmer and admin, so knew many people involved in SMP development and got to watch it as it progressed, and then was put into production by working physicists.