In "Coders at Work", page 141, Brendan Eich talks about wanting to build a scheme-like language for the browser. The c-like syntax was adopted because Netscape wanted it to look like Java.

    Scheme: First-class functions, tail-call elimination, macros,
            hygienic macros, write and parse the AST directly.
    JavaScript: First-class functions.
    
    Scheme: Immutable arrays and lists, mutable strings.
    JavaScript: Mutable-only arrays, immutable-only strings.

If I were describing JavaScript to someone who was a programming language expert but somehow was never exposed to it, I would describe it as "Scheme, with C syntax, no tail calls, and a strange prototype-based object system".

They should; Perl 5 compares quite well and Perl 6 fares even better (of the nine fundamental features of a Lisp, lacking only homoiconicity). See the book Higher-Order Perl, for example.

http://hop.perl.plover.com/

While Scheme's syntax superficially looks like it's data, specification does not imply that there should be accessible AST as list structure anywhere (in contrast to Common Lisp, which is specified in terms of list structures and algorithm to build them from text serialization)

And by the way: You have left off the one most important defining feature of Scheme: first-class continuations. And JavaScript really does not have them (I would say that this is completely reasonable omission for JS's purpose)

It is interesting to imagine what could have happened if Netscape had shipped with a Lisp. Probably a lot more people would hate Lisp today!

So I can't really agree that it's not any more Scheme-like than anything else out there. I do agree it's not particularly Scheme-like.

[1] IIRC eg in this presentation: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/The-State-and-Future-of-J...