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It's very simple, elegant, and powerful -- like no other language I know (and I've learned well over a dozen, of a variety of paradigms).

It's easy to write, easy to read, and easily does everything I need. I prize clarity over almost anything else when programming, and Scheme lets me do that way more effectively than anything else. There's very little syntax or boilerplate to get in the way.

It's also very consistent, and I like that.

The worst languages feel cobbled together or congealed rather than designed. Scheme is the opposite of that.




Heh, your reasons for loving Scheme are basically word-for-word why I love Python.


python is more or less a scheme with syntax training wheels that make it a bit more beginner friendly.

Not being facetious either. it has the same semantics and a lot of python's early adopters were former lispers.

That said, scheme the language is much more powerful than python. in exchange for the easy syntax, python lost macros and took on a crippled lambda syntax.


Scheme is a lot smaller, simpler, and more elegant than Python.

Though I like that Python takes some inspiration from Lisp, it has a lot of unnecessary complexity and inconsistency which leads to a lot of gotchas.

Python's additional syntax make it less readable and harder to write for me than Scheme. It's only more "beginner friendly" if you're used to Algol-like languages, otherwise Scheme is simpler to understand.

Just my 2c




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