I think part of the reason Guile failed is that it just sort of petered out. I think any attempt to replace elisp with scheme will have to start with a bang to overcome network effects. The hypothetical nonprofit would wait until they had enough money to do so, and then start development.
(They could hold the money and any interest in an escrow account to reassure donors.)<p>Personally, I hate dynamic scoping and having 2 namespaces. Also, whenever I see a piece of emacs is written in C I think it's best to just use the C function as written and not even try to understand it. Having scheme all the way down would dramatically lower the psychological barrier to fiddling with low-level functions like font-rendering. (i.e. I don't think it would have taken till version 23 to get anti-aliased fonts if it was scheme all the way down)<p>What do you all think? Bad idea? Good idea? Do you also hate lisp-2s and dynamic scooping?
Climacs and Hemlock have existed for many years, but there's been no flood of users. Both are high-quality emacs-like editors written in common lisp; both have many extensions for development, mail, news etc.<p>I can't imagine a donation-supported project going from scratch would be substantially more successful just because it used Scheme instead of CL.<p>Climacs:
<a href="http://common-lisp.net/project/climacs/" rel="nofollow">http://common-lisp.net/project/climacs/</a><p>CMUCL Hemlock:
<a href="http://www.cons.org/cmucl/hemlock/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cons.org/cmucl/hemlock/</a><p>Portable Hemlock:
<a href="http://common-lisp.net/project/phemlock/" rel="nofollow">http://common-lisp.net/project/phemlock/</a><p>P.S.<p>I agree with your goals: I really don't enjoy elisp at all. It reminds me just enough of CL and Scheme to be sick at what it lacks.