I don't really see the point of this article. You don't need Fortran or C to implement the calculations of the Fibonacci as described in the article.
On top of that the article is missing the point that some elements functional programming (map, lambda) are actually making a numerical implementation neater.
It is not an accident that the original authors of R were themselves lispers and admitted having been inspired by lisp when creating R.
The article didn't claim that FORTRAN or C are required for these calculations. Rather, It lamented that the prevailing attitude of Lisp practitioners was to eschew the knowledge behind those calculations.
On top of that the article is missing the point that some elements functional programming (map, lambda) are actually making a numerical implementation neater.
It is not an accident that the original authors of R were themselves lispers and admitted having been inspired by lisp when creating R.
I think among others, those links will illustrate the previous point: http://cran.r-project.org/doc/html/interface98-paper/paper.h... http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/downloads/Compstat-200...