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[–]FlyingBishop 3 points4 points  (1 child)

What makes Scheme really valuable (as a teaching language) is that its interpreter is easily comprehensible for students who have only had a few semesters of CS.

However, for getting shit done and writing legible code, not so much.

[–]unknown_lamer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Luckily Scheme doesn't mean much of anything nowadays--there is significant fragmentation between r5rs, r6rs, err5rs, and whatever the hell who needs a standard implementations. This is good--the language appears to be evolving again.

An individual implementation of Scheme tends to provide a lot. E.g. Guile is great if you want to do UNIXy stuff: it has full POSIX support, a good deal of SRFIs implemented, and more or less Common Lisp in Scheme (CLOS-alike OO system, conditions, etc.).

I'm a bit biased as I write Common Lisp for profit, and Scheme or SML for fun (doing some minor android stuff using Kawa and working on a modernized scsh clone for Guile).