Hard to say. I speculate that it's because there are more attractive
languages in the various ecological niches it inhabits - ruby and
python are more unixy when you want a scripting language, common lisp
is more 'batteries included' when you want a lisp, ocaml is faster
when you want a multiparadigm language. But when you want a teaching
language, it's hard to beat scheme, and nigh impossible to beat the
DrScheme environment. Then the question is not whether it'll scale up
to be the *best* real-world application platform you can find, but
merely whether it *can* scale up from toy programs to real-world
applications, and the answer to that I'd say is "yes".

Also, I just found out that Euphoria (http://www.rapideuphoria.com/)
has gone open source, which suddenly makes it a very attractive first
language indeed. Check it out - I know I'm going to start recommending
it to beginners once I've written a couple of small programs to
convince myself it's a pleasant language. The only caveat seems to be
the lack of lexical closures; I'm torn over whether that makes a
difference in a first language.

martin

On 2/13/07, SonOfLilit <sonoflilit / gmail.com> wrote:
> Then, out of curiosity, why don't people USE it for real world apps?
>
> Aur Saraf
>
> On 2/12/07, Martin DeMello <martindemello / gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 2/13/07, SonOfLilit <sonoflilit / gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Again - if she'd want to build a real world application  in scheme,
> > COULD
> > > she?
> >
> > With PLT scheme, almost certainly. It ships with a very nice
> > complement of libraries.
> >
> > martin
> >
> >
>