C is the foundation of computing in the sense that essentially every programming language and operating system is written in C or C++, and those are the tools that enable every other piece of software.  More precisely, I would say that C is the foundation of software; it&#x27;s how we stopped throwing out our programs when we changed computers.  The first portable operating system kernels were written in C.<p>I guess I could have been more precise and said that the lambda calculus (rather than Scheme&#x2F;Lisp) is not the foundation of computing.  It seems like there are people who still think this; see my recent response here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11412392" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11412392</a><p>You could say Lisp and Scheme are proof of that.  To actually be bootstrapped, they had to add all this other stuff like vectors and hash tables.  I don&#x27;t know the details of how well those are axiomatized.  Paul Graham&#x27;s Arc tried to a little further down, i.e. unifying functions and macros, defining numbers in terms of lists a la Peano arithmetic, etc., but I&#x27;m not sure how far that effort went.<p>I mentioned all my experience with Lisp... doing SICP 19 years ago, and then coming back to it.  As I said, I think it&#x27;s outstanding research, but if you are trying to build an entire computing universe out of it, that&#x27;s folly.  Good luck.  It&#x27;s just not powerful enough -- once you add all the stuff you actually need, you&#x27;re not far from the complexity of C.