And now Racket, which used to be a Scheme, doesn't call itself a Scheme anymore.

In fact it describes itself on its web site as "The best of Scheme and Lisp."

The sentence at the root of this subthread, namely "I do really wish that Guix used Lisp rather than Scheme" isn't an argument about labels.

> Arguing about whether or not "Lisp" means "Common Lisp" doesn't advance anybody's understanding of Common Lisp.

But not expecting Common Lisp to behave like Scheme helps. The design for the Scheme language is simply different from Common Lisp and thus code looks and behaves differently.

I agree with everything you said. The argument is tedious and fruitless. My point is an empirical one: Programmers of a Certain Age were more likely to use "Lisp" than programmers of other ages.

I don't mind that Scheme exists, but I do mind that enthusiasts naively use it to build production systems, because they end up wasting time & energy re-implementing things the Common Lisp standard already specifies rather than spending that time & energy on the problems that they're actually trying to solve.

Scheme is another Blub: a Scheme user looks at Common Lisp and thinks, 'hey, I don't need generic functions; I don't need packages; I don't want separate namespaces for separate things; I don't want to extend my reader.' Meanwhile someone who's built large systems in both Lisp & Scheme realises how glad he is to have those things.

Meanwhile, the ecosystems of non-Lisp-family languages grow ever-larger, and hence ever-more-appealing, which is a problem because while Scheme-the-language is better than Python-the-language or Go-the-language, Scheme-the-fractured-ecosystem is worse than Python-the-healthy-ecosystem or Go-the-astoundingly-robust-ecosystem, which means more people use Python & Go, which means fewer people use Lisp-family languages … it's a vicious cycle.

Which means the world is a worse place, stuck in a local maximum of C-family languages and unable to break out to the Lispy global maximum.

> In my experience they often prefer that scheme/etc ceased to exist at all.

Alright. Well that doesn't really work when choosing words and definitions.