How strongly do people actually feel about the translator to lisp
in maxima?
Having two totally different code bases which are supposed to have
identical behavior seems like a maintenance nightmare. It might well
impede progress.
A different model could be that one keeps only the interpreter and
that people write performance critical functions in lisp (which seems
to be the defacto standard anyway as far as I can tell).
A similar model is followed in perl and python (of course programs
are byte compiled to an internal form). In maxima it is even
easier as the underlying lisp system is very accessible.
Michel