A lot of the challenge in programming is in choosing the right tools, as you know. It is true that to understand the underlying guts, studying academic (?) papers and source code is the right way to proceed. I should have said "help me understand how to use the science of matching".

I'm building a C extension library that embeds LISP concepts (and more) in C, and, yes, Allen's "Anatomy of LISP" helps me optimize it, but Patrick Henry Winston's "LISP" showed me what features I needed to have and gave me the insights I needed to extend it in useful ways.

It's often difficult to see past an author's bias in a technical paper. Having experts such as yourself comment and complement the original discourse adds immeasurably to the utility of the work, and that's what I was praising you for.