Scheme vs. Common Lisp

A Comparison Between Scheme and Common Lisp

Functions are really first class: Although Common Lisp is a functional language it makes programming functionally much harder than Scheme. For example to call a function that was returned as a result you have to use the funcall expression. Likewise special operations are required to access the function value of a variable. This seems unnecessary to me.

This is one of those things that has really bugged me whenever I’ve been tempted to use Common Lisp instead of Scheme.

The Next Big Language

Steve Yegge blogged about The Next Big Language. (Yeah, yeah. I’m behind on my Google Reader reading and on finishing draft blog posts.) I wonder if anyone has ever grafted C-ish syntax onto Common Lisp—along with some prettifying of it’s libraries. Kind of like Dylan, but with syntax closer to C than to ALGOL. I’m not sure it’s a great idea, but it seems like such a thing would attract some attention.