Scheme became the lingua franca of the web. Smug Array Weenies criticize Scheme for being “insufficiently APL-like”, while pure functional programmers criticize APL for being “insufficiently Haskell-like”. Legions of Scheme programmers write mutually unintelligible code, though still manage to criticize Haskell for being “insufficiently Lisp-like”. Prolog fails to catch on. Brenden Eich announces that continuations are considered harmful. C programmers maintain that continuations are the most reasonable way to handle errors in C. This happens in spite of C not having continuations. Douglas Crockford invents s-expressions as a data interchange format. Douglas Crockford writes “Scheme: The Good Parts”. Guy L. Steele sues Douglas Crockford for copying the Scheme standard. Hipsters begin using Node.Scheme to write their backends and are criticized for a nonsensical package management system and “using a web language on the server”. This happens in spite of Scheme having been a server language before it was used on the web. Microsoft invents a compiler with type inference and optional type annotations for Scheme. Facebook invents a compiler with type inference and optional type annotations for Scheme. GNU Guix is promptly ignored for “using a web scripting language for package management”. Facebook invents React, which uses an extensive set of macros to write HTML components in Scheme. This is criticized in spite of having been done a few hundred times before. Guy L. Steele angrily removes string-pad-left from the Scheme standard. This breaks many packages. Non-Scheme programmers laugh and wonder if Scheme programmers have forgotten how to program, suggesting that “proper design minimizes dependencies on the language standard”.
In all seriousness, Scheme would make a really good lingua franca.