I also dream of what it would be like if lisp in the browser had become mainstream, but it's possible that if he had implemented it like he wanted to, it wouldn't have received such wide spread adoption like javascript did.
> it's possible that if he had implemented it like he wanted to, it wouldn't have received such wide spread adoption like javascript did.
I don't care for Scheme, but I'd be very, very surprised if it'd have failed in such a situation. If a terrible train wreck of a language like JavaScript can succeed, pretty much anything better than INTERCAL can. People wanted to extend browsers; had Scheme been the only way to do that, Scheme is what they'd have used.
True. My optimistic/pessimistic daydream is that, as the only game in town for some period of time, it would have introduced enough developers to the language to really give it traction. We'd now be seeing people asking "Why can't I run the same language on the server as in the browser?" It would be the second renaissance!
If I had more free time on my hands, or were king of the world and could make it so, a fun exercise would be to retrofit Firefox / Chromium to support Scheme as replacements for HTML/CSS/Javascript and get a merry band of geeks to build a shadow web.
