[eadmund]

> CL also has unhygienic macros, non-lispy loop grossness, lots of cruft, lots of poorly named functions that are named two different ways in two different places, and generally reeks of the 70s.

That's all true enough; I believe that non-hygienic macros are a vital capability of a programming language (and Common Lisp being a Lisp-n makes them much less of a problem), and that LOOP is okay. I don't mind the cruft much: it's a mostly-backwards-compatible language, and backwards-compatibility is important; it's why Lisp code from the 80s can still run now, almost 40 years later.

I don't hate Scheme, really: it's a very neat little language. But it's completely unsuited for production work on large systems, which are what I'm interested in. Case in point: call/cc. It's nifty, really cool and absolutely has no place in any production system — it's ultimately just a very-lightly-structured GOTO.