[kazinator]

We don't need educational languages; people should use real production languages from day one.

Scheme implementations are that now, and maybe even standard Scheme is that now, but historically it has not been.

1998 was almost a quarter century after Scheme started. That year, R5RS came out, yet it defined no way to decompose a program into separately compiled files, and didn't specify what is an error (beyond saying that it's something that can happen that an implementation should diagnose) or how to recover from one. Even BASIC for 8 bit microcomputers had ON ERR GOTO.

(Good thing R5RS specified hygienic macros, because unwanted capture is a the real threat to your all-in-one-file program with no error handling.)