[pinealservo]

Scheme is absolutely a suitable replacement for perl or ruby, but the ease with which you can accomplish things will depend on the set of libraries available, which varies a lot between implementations.

Racket is not just Scheme anymore, but it does still support various versions of Scheme as well as a number of Scheme-based languages. It has a package management system and a fairly large set of packages for basic tasks. The core system, base libraries, and major libraries are well documented and it's got a great built-in IDE.

Guile also does more than just Scheme, but it's been the "official extension language of GNU" for a very long time, so it's got bindings to a lot of libraries and it's used in some interesting applications and tools.

Chicken Scheme also comes with a package system, 'eggs', that has a pretty nice collection of practical packages available for easy installation. You can run your programs via the interpreter, or you can compile them via the compiler, which goes through C so it's got great C interop.

There are a lot of other options with a variety of strengths and weaknesses, but those are good ones to look at for starting out and doing scripting duties.