This is frequently held up as an example of CL being more true to McCarthy's vision than Scheme. The counterargument is that code-compatibility is a poor measure of conceptually realizing McCarthy's ideals--rather Scheme's more academic approach has caused it to compromise less on McCarthy's vision. Where CL compromised for pragmatic reasons, Scheme has kept more purer abstractions, even improving on McCarthy's original Lisp. In this argument, Scheme results from a deeper understanding of of an idealized Lisp, whereas CL is a pragmatic compromise that allows Lisp to be used for industrial applications.
Personally, I don't take a side in this debate, because I don't care.
> realizing McCarthy's ideals--rather Scheme's more academic approach has caused it to compromise less on McCarthy's vision.
What were those 'ideals'? What was that vision?
> even improving on McCarthy's original Lisp
Common Lisp improved the original Lisp, too. It vastly expanded into the areas which were interesting for McCarthy: AI programming. Common Lisp was the base for thousands of research & development projects. That was McCarthy's vision: a tool for AI research.
>In this argument, Scheme results from a deeper understanding of of an idealized Lisp
No, Scheme went away from the idealized Lisp. -> R6RS.
> Personally, I don't take a side in this debate, because I don't care.
> That was McCarthy's vision: a tool for AI research.
You don't know that.
> No, Scheme went away from the idealized Lisp. -> R6RS.
Neat! I'm glad we cleared that up.
EDIT: Okay, maybe "You don't know that" is a bit strongly-worded; there's no doubt that that was part of McCarthy's vision, but there's a great more to Lisp than that, and notably, Scheme is also a pretty good tool for AI research. The real fundamental point I'm making is that the "Common Lisp is One True Lisp" vs "Scheme is One True Lisp" vs "There Are Many True Lisps" is based on unclear goals that nobody really knows. McCarthy is dead and it's questionable whether he was the sole proprietor of the "ideal Lisp" concept anyway.
Sure we know what McCarthy developed Lisp for: as a tool for AI research. It's already mentioned in the very first paragraph of the 1960 paper on Lisp.
Sure there are several Lisp dialects and a bunch of derived languages, like Scheme.
> Sure we know what McCarthy developed Lisp for: as a tool for AI research. It's already mentioned in the very first paragraph of the 1960 paper on Lisp.
> Sure there are several Lisp dialects and a bunch of derived languages, like Scheme.
Sure, that's one thing that it was when McCarthy started developing it, but the original Lisp paper doesn't say "only" and you don't know how McCarthy's intentions developed as the language developed.
> Sure, that's one thing that it was when McCarthy started developing it, but the original Lisp paper doesn't say "only" and you don't know how McCarthy's intentions developed as the language developed.
McCarthy later did not care too much about Lisp development and direction himself, since he was working on core AI topics then.
But the field of AI caused massive investment into Lisp during the 70s and 80s, until it died out in the early 90s. We are talking about something like 2 billion USD.
Ugh, when you say "Lisp" you're talking about "Common Lisp"?
AI industry has invested into a lot of languages, including Scheme, but also including stuff like C++/Java/Python/Ocaml. Trivially Google has invested more in Python AI than $2 billion, and I wouldn't be surprised if Jane Street has invested more than that in OCaml AI. So I'm not really sure what you're trying to prove here.
Personally, I don't take a side in this debate, because I don't care.