It is the Scmeme way: You'll quickly see half a dozen of different and incompatible implementations, but not a single newsworthy project on top of them. And soon after that, they will get bored and start yet another cycle of speciation.
It was R6's goal also. But it didnt accomplish the stated goal but just introduced more incompatibility into the overall Scheme ecosystem. But instead letting all implementations at least get up to R6, they now have R7 on the horizon. They afre churning standards out more quickly as implementors can implement them.
And frankly, I dont see what the point will be: R7 small is not much differrent than R5, so it is kind of pointless. R7 big is as big as common lisp, and very few implementations will have the resources and the willingness to implement it and discard their current non-standard APIs they had for years. And even if the majority of them manages to implement R7, they will finally reach the point where Common LIsp was 1994, with no added value over Common Lisp, provided of course they dont decide to obsolete R7 also and get to R8 before that.
So R6 is bad because it's a big departure from R5 but R7-small is bad because it doesn't change much?
The point of R7 is to make it is easy for implementation to upgrade from R5 after the controversial R6.
Ideally, most of the libraries in R7-big will be able to be written mostly in R7-small. If they are smart, they'll make a R7-big FFI library, and then every other library can be written in R7 + C.
This means an implementation would only need to implement R7-small and would get all the libraries of R7-big for free.
