[rscho]

Scheme is geared towards two things: research and teaching. It's a lingua franca for demonstrating implementations of new CS concepts in ways that members of the community understand. Being easy to implement from scratch is a must for both uses cases. Being a less imperative language also makes Scheme closer to the math.

[yyyk2]

Is it really? I haven't read many papers where new algorithms or techniques were demonstrated using Scheme.

> Being easy to implement from scratch is a must for both uses cases.

If you are teaching how to write a compiler or an interpreter, yes. Otherwise I would have to disagree.

[rscho]

Ok, I shouldn't have said 'algorithm'. Let's restrict that to 'untyped programming language theory'.