RISC came about because UNIX weenies can't make a complex chip run fast or a compiler that can use those instructions. CISC was coined by RISC weenies to mean anything that's not RISC. Lisp machines are CISC, which makes them bad. Mainframes are CISC, which makes them bad. When you get rid of all the buzzwords and weenie bullshit, "complex" means any instruction that's not used by C compilers.
There's a lot of merit to Lisp machines. There's a lot of merit to more conventional CISCs too.
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~kubitron/cs252/handouts/papers/symbolics.pdf
"RISC is to hardware what the UNIX operating system
[sic] is to software."
Subject: Wait, I thought RISC was a *good* idea
No, the quote is exactly right. RISC is a lazy solution
along the lines of "well, we don't know how to write
compilers that use complex instructions efficiently, and we
don't know how to design complex hardware that runs fast, so
we'll make everything simple, and we can advertise we run at
80Mhz even though the system supports fewer user than a 1
MIP DEC-20."
It's exactly analagous to "you can use pipes and
redirection shell scripts to do anything, so we don't have
to write any REAL programs" and "portability is more
important that usability" philosophies so rampant in the
unix world.
(Was I properly vitrolic this time?)