[cbd1984]

People say this and it's not really true.

Scheme has mutable state. Scheme has unmarked side-effects. Scheme has variables, as opposed to tags applied to constant values.

Scheme was an entirely new kind of language back when lambda expressions were Heavy Deep Magic and dynamic typing was something you did when your Flexowriter was well-oiled (hyperbole intentional). These days, it's no weirder than Javascript or the more modern dialects of Java or Visual C#.Net. Hell, even C++ is getting lambdas and closures, and that's a Serious Business COBOL-Replacement Language.

Modern Algol dialects are Scheme in everything except syntax, and now that metaprogramming (Ruby, to begin with) is beginning to catch on, I fully expect language designers to re-invent some shambolic version of s-expressions when they realize that metaprogramming in Algol syntax is hard.

Scheme won. It's just that its victory was suppressed for political reasons.