Cadence SKILL, which is heavily influenced by Scheme, is still actively used to extend functionality of the EDA tools. Other languages commonly seen used in TI is Perl, Tcl, C (obviously), assembly and Python.
SKILL is such a weird language. It tries to be both a C and a Scheme, and ends up at a surprisingly ok compromise. I quite enjoyed working with it, which was beneficial since most of my colleagues did not...
Cadence has two separate languages, SKILL and SKILL++, using the same runtime. SKILL is derived from Franz Lisp, which is dynamically scoped. SKILL++ is influenced by Scheme. SKILL++ has lexical scoping and has an object system. Both languages allow a postfix notation that makes it superficially familiar to non-Lisp languages. IMHO, the Lisp style is more usable and readable.
SKILL++ is actually a pretty compliant Scheme, with a lot of compatibility to SKILL and quite a bit of Common Lisp added on top. What makes it a bit funny is the clever parser, which allows both prefix syntax as in
(setq x (plus a b))
as well as
x = a + b
(which just reads as the former expression). Personally, I prefer the Lisp style much - except for math expressions.
Don't think so.
Here, Cadence refers to "Cadence Design Systems".
"Cadence Research Systems" seems less clear.
In any case, Chez Scheme was the long-term project of Kent Dybvig.