Nothing has to be wrong with CL for me to prefer Schemes or vice-versa, and nothing has to be wrong with OCaml for me to prefer F# or vice-versa. My preference for Chicken Scheme over CL historically has been:
* Chicken has always been free, with almost all of its
library BSD-licensed, whereas CL used to be expensive.
* Chicken has had a really good packaging story (eggs) for
a long time, whereas QuickLisp is new
* Chicken has always been able to produce static binaries,
which, as the Go aficionados will tell you, makes deployment
really awesome.
If you prefer SBCL, good for you. There was a post fairly recently about how CL's library situation is becoming awesome, and I hope that continues.
Chicken Scheme is a specific Scheme implementation, Common Lisp is a language with three dozen implementations.
Free CL from day zero: CMUCL. CMUCL originates in Spice Lisp (1980), from before Common Lisp. CMUCL has spawned commercial and free variants (SBCL).
Free: CLISP, 1987. Free: GCL, 1994.
Still, Chicken Scheme is great! Though I prefer CL.
Nothing. But Schemers just passionately hate it since the 70s because it doesnt enforce their religious dogmas like recursion, continuations, unusable macros, and other similarly silly pretexts.
The fact that the GNU extension language became a Scheme instead of a Lisp is primarily a very personal decision by Richard Stallman. Early Lisp Machine companies like Symbolics refused to copyleft their stuff, so RMS started to hate them with a passion.
So even as he was a Lisp fan early on, which can be seen in Emacs, he for political reasons switched the GNU projet to Scheme, even as the GNU project had no working Scheme implementations but had two Lisp implementations (CLisp and GCL).
So to answer your question: Nothing is wrong with Lisp, but the dear leader hates it, because the Symbolics guys were meanies when he was 25 yrs old.
You might want to read a less harried account on the history of Scheme than this.
Wikipedia names continuations, tail recursion in the standard, hygienic macros and a shared namespace for variables and procedures as defining differences between Common Lisp and Scheme.
Wow, your comment history is really full of classic troll stuff. "HN is throughly infected with the communist delusion, commonly observed with atheist intelectuals." Check yourself, dude.
