Haskell and Scheme: Which One and Why?

While I was waiting for stuff to install on my new machine, I was doing some browsing around the web, and came across an interesting article at a blog called “The Only Winning Move”, titled [Scheme Death Knell?](http://theonlywinningmove.blogspot.com/2006/10/scheme-death-knell.html). It’s not a bad article at all, but I disagree with its conclusions, and I thought it would be interesting to
discuss why.
The article was brought on by *another* blog post, this one at [Lambda the Ultimate](http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/) suggesting that someone translate Douglas Hofstadter’s columns introducing Scheme to replace the Scheme with Haskell.
Josh over at TOWM was slightly irritated by this idea, and concludes that the only reason
why people are suggesting that is because scheme is getting too old to be cool and trendy,
and so they want to switch to something newer.
I disagree.
Haskell is a *very* different language from Scheme, and I think that there are some genuinely good
reasons for teaching Haskell instead of Scheme. I *also* think there are some genuinely good reasons for using Scheme instead of Haskell. It’s not really clear to me which is better, but it’s worth contrasting the two to help understand the tradeoff.


Syntax

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