Re: What's so cool about Scheme?

[Jerry Jackson <address@hidden>]

The support for functional programming and higher-order functions is 
certainly a
big part of the attraction of Lisp and Scheme.  However, if that were 
the main
thing, I think I'd probably like Haskell or Clean better -- and I don't. 
  The
thing that always stands out for me is the extremely regular syntax combined
with the powerful macro facilities.  This really takes it to the next 
level.  Writing
an application in Common Lisp or Scheme always feels more like creating 
a specialized
language for the application domain and then scripting up the app than 
it does in
any other environment.  It's particularly nice how the user-written 
language extensions
fit so seamlessly into the overall syntax model.  This is something that 
definitely
gets lost in languages without the strong "code is data" support.  Even 
if a language
has powerful macros (like Dylan), without the regular syntax it's much 
harder to
make an extension look like "built-in" stuff.

--Jerry