[braythwayt]

Hey, I'm not claiming that JS is Scheme, or that Scheme is defined by closures :-)

My personal "What makes Scheme, Scheme" predates current Scheme implementations by decades. But I go with, "There are five special forms that are essentially axioms of the language, and everything else is made by combining those forms with each other."

The deep elegance of building a rich language on top of a handful of axiomatic features is what makes Scheme feel Scheme-ish to me.

I understand that Scheme has evolved since everything was implemented in terms of the special forms, but still...