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Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

Isn't Racket Scheme? They have an R6RS language for Racket (http://docs.racket-lang.org/r6rs/Using_R6RS_with_DrRacket.ht...).

I don't see how that's "moving on" if it's still Scheme.

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Racket is a Scheme descendent, but it isn't exactly Scheme.

https://racket-lang.org/new-name.html

A lot of modern languages seem to eschew what they are derived from; Pharo isn't Smalltalk either, SWI-Prolog now defaults to a standards-incompatible mode, etc.

I would say it is a consequence of their origins fading away on the mainstream or being stuck in some university classes.

So they have to search for new grounds, instead of being stuck into a design that no longer has the attention of the industry.

Having a language defined by a standard is good if you can't have portable compilers/interpreters. Once your compiler is available on all the platforms you use, the utility seems to fall off a cliff.

I agree regarding standards, my point is that the existing standards got stuck into a point that does appeal to the masses any longer.

Another example is Pascal, the original standard was too little for what people were actually using it for.

Most of the extensions were then standardized as Extended Pascal, but no one cared because a selling point was being Turbo Pascal compatible.

Racket is a scheme in one sense but not spiritually. It's a unified learning environment. The editor works hand in hand with the language engine, which you can mold however you like, there's a sophisticated package system, etc. It's practically an insult to describe racket as "a scheme implementation". It's not wrong, but it's a massive understatement.

No, Racket is a separate language, though it grew out of a Scheme implementation (PLT Scheme) and still includes its predecessor.

I thought that PLT Scheme had actually diverged from Scheme (though it included an R5RS implementation) long before they decided to change to Racket the name based on that fact.

Yes, but I think it continues in the general spirit of Scheme, despite things like immutable cons cells that make it not fully backward-compatible.

Well, you can say that Scheme continues in the general spirit of MACLISP, yet we separate them.

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