scheme - my opinion

scheme is an interesting language, but ... Scheme has been designed for programming language research, rather than practical use. It has such a history of minimalism that all scheme implementations had to provide extensions to be useful. It still is missing many things. For example, my beloved (when ...) is missing (from the standard). Hashtables are missing. (call-with-current-continuation) is a very interesting function, but one cannot expect ordinary humans to understand it. It is only a tool for system implementors. Continuations are gotos into the middle of another function, one that may already have returned! The scheme community seems to be in a downturn. From casual visits to the scheme repository, there seems to be little progress in implementations or standardization. However, there is hope for guile, which has been adopted by gimp, and has active development. Caveat: I have never done programming language research. Martin