This divisive thread is distressing to me. As someone who struggles every year or two to preserve Scheme as a development language inside a medium-size company, I think it works much better to view CL and Scheme as a family of languages used in both industry and academia. Squabbling between the camps makes both look smaller. In reality, you can often draw on CL people to do Scheme work and vice-versa.
I think he's talking about some CL bashing implicit in our discussion. My intention was not to diss CL, just to say that it represents a different design philosophy that is somehow antagonistic to what's been the tradition in Scheme. Portability, practicality and completeness over minimalism, beauty, and perfectionism (within reasonable limits; there are some practical compromises in Scheme too). Both approaches have their advantages and their (overlapping) audiences.
Now the RnRS name has been hijacked to refer to a totally different process, and by extension an attempt has been made to hijack the name Scheme for something that is a whole new Lisp dialect. I think the RnRS name has lost credibility, and I don't think the appropriation of the name Scheme will be successful. You'll hear the name Common Scheme a lot from now on.
So no, it's not the same camp anymore. Enjoy your PLT, Chez, Larceny, or Scheme48, and best of lucks.
Can you answer this: Do people call Scheme a dialect of Lisp? I know often its spoken that way. But as an active (and avid?) user of scheme is it wrong to call it "a lisp"? Or when people say Lisp do they really mean CL (other then in academic circles)?
No, it is not wrong at all. In the SICP video lectures they call it just Lisp all of the time.
It's true that when someone says Lisp they often mean CL. If it's important for you to highlight that you are talking about the family of languages, you may say "the Lisps" or "a Lisp". But just Lisp should be okay too.
Good to know. Yes I love the SICP videos and noticed that - but then they were done in the 80's, wasn't sure if things had changed somewhat since then.
In my limited exploration, I always though CL was showing its age, yet scheme seemed more "timeless" - if you can say that about programming languages.
