For one thing, it makes the distinction between language keywords and variables clear - no problems in using `$switch` or `$var`, and even more important, the core devs don't have to take as much care when developing new language features. Not that I usually use variable names like these, but it quickly becomes automatic to use a dollar sign.

Hey, here’s someone who never saw Perl and doesn’t know how PHP evolved.

This is in fact an alternative universe I have thought about quite a bit.

I'm more on the strong-typed side of life nowadays. But otherwise I think it is a good choice. Also: HTML could be expressed in scheme as well. Scheme all the way down.

Guile in the browser would make plenty of sense had someone not shoved the mess that was early JS into the world.

But now you need a ton of time to type things.