Let's see if I have this right. I could be wrong about the details here:
Before it was called "Scheme," Sussman was writing papers about a lisp subset that could be optimized. Some folks tried to write an optimizing compiler, known as "T."
Common Lisp was a superset of a bunch of vendor Lisp systems, even more monstrously complex than any individual vendor Lisp.
So if I follow the author: If a CL implementation was indeed faster and better-optimized than the simpler Scheme dialect, then what was the purpose of Scheme?
The initial purpose of Scheme was to implement Hewitt's Actor model in Lisp. Steele and Sussman realized that "actors" were the same as lexical closures [1].
The Lambda Papers [2] describe the early implementation details of Scheme, and it was these papers that influenced the development of T [3].
Before it was called "Scheme," Sussman was writing papers about a lisp subset that could be optimized. Some folks tried to write an optimizing compiler, known as "T."
http://mumble.net/~jar/tproject/
Common Lisp was a superset of a bunch of vendor Lisp systems, even more monstrously complex than any individual vendor Lisp.
So if I follow the author: If a CL implementation was indeed faster and better-optimized than the simpler Scheme dialect, then what was the purpose of Scheme?