Am Fr., 11. Sept. 2020 um 17:35 Uhr schrieb <xxxxxx@ancell-ent.com>:
>
> > From: "Marc Nieper-Wißkirchen" <xxxxxx@nieper-wisskirchen.de>
> > Date: Friday, September 11, 2020 9:47 AM
> >
> > Am Fr., 11. Sept. 2020 um 16:31 Uhr schrieb <xxxxxx@ancell-ent.com>:
> >
> >>> [...] The unfortunate thing with Scheme is the dearth of actively
> >>> developed applications. Apps are needed to put library designs to
> >>> the test.
> >>
> >> This is actually a very, *very* bad sign about the state of the Scheme
> >> world.  One I'm planning on addressing at least a bit, but Real Life
> >> is hitting me very hard for the foreseeable future.
> >
> > We have probably more implementations of Scheme than applications
> > written in Scheme. :) But even with so many implementations, the
> > competition with other languages is hard because there is usually more
> > money to maintain high-quality implementations of those languages.
> > (Another reason why it was very costly to the RNRS process to, well,
> > alienate Chez and Racket.)
>
> That was inevitable due to the near total rejection of R6RS by the
> existing long term Scheme community (check the balloting, not to
> mention how very few existing implementations made the switch).

That something had to be done was probably inevitable, and indeed R7RS
fixes some flaws of R6RS. But such a fix could have been much more
conservative with respect to R6RS. For example, the small language
could have been defined as a proper subset of R6RS together with some
repairs. Of course, hindsight is easier than foresight, but from
today's perspective, things weren't handled optimally after R6RS had
happened.

> As for Chez, perhaps I'm missing some vital history, but the dates
> would seem to argue another story:
>
> 2007: R6RS ratification, including a yes vote by R. Kent Dybvig,
>   resulting in Chez moving to it.
> 2011: Cadence Research Systems bought by Cisco, Chez becomes
>   unobtainium outside of Cisco.
> 2013: R7RS ratification
> 2016: Cisco makes Chez open source (was that promised beforehand???)

I don't see a relation here, nor can I speak anything for Chez or the
people behind it (to which I am not connected in any way). But the
people behind Chez seemed to have stopped working in favor of new
standards after the split after R6RS. The same is true for the Racket
people. The people that are currently active in the SRFI process, we,
are just a small circle, far away from the academic circles that had
defined and shaped Scheme.

> Among other things, Racket's current envisioned path of ditching
> S-expressions for an infix syntax suggests, absent a fork that long
> term collaboration was never in the cards.  But I don't know enough
> about it, I never found it or its predecessors interesting.

If I look at what they are doing, I can only take off my head to them.
While I may or not may like everything they put into Racket, they do
invent new things and develop the language further (on a certain scale
much more than we do here as we do mostly trivial things). Whether we
like it or not, Racket has probably a much higher chance to survive in
the long term than R7RS (large). Anyway, I can't speak for the Racket
people, but reading old mailing lists from the time when Scheme was
forked into R6RS and R7RS, it doesn't sound that they would have
abandoned RnRS if R7RS didn't break with its predecessor.

Marc