Products · Product
Scheme
Raised as a usability problem by 16 people on Hacker News over 18 years (2009–2026), in 17 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Must hunt through SRFI numbers; implementations support different subsetsUnreviewed
20092026- Long list of SRFI numbers with no plain-language explanation, so newcomers can't tell what they mean2025-10-23
- Must hunt through SRFI numbers and specs, with implementations supporting different subsets2024-01-29
- Must search 200+ SRFIs, check support, and read specs since implementations don't document them2023-05-08
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 17 complaints
- Tail call optimization destroys stacktrace usefulness, making debugging hard2026-05-25
- Long list of SRFI numbers with no plain-language explanation, so newcomers can't tell what they mean2025-10-23
- Must hunt through SRFI numbers and specs, with implementations supporting different subsets2024-01-29
- Article layout is hard to read on a phone2023-10-10
- Uniform parentheses make code hard to read and understand at first glance2023-06-08
- Must search 200+ SRFIs, check support, and read specs since implementations don't document them2023-05-08
- Spent hours compiling and fighting package and version problems just to get Scheme installed2022-11-04
- Hard to find a missing parenthesis; must check by eye in the REPL2020-02-04
- Scheme macros are hard to read, requiring tracking multiple levels of computation2018-05-01
- Scheme sacrifices usability for purity, making real work harder2017-07-15
- Macro tools felt confusing and arcane, and differ uncomfortably from the rest of Scheme2017-05-14
- Function names are so long that writing them repeatedly is tedious2016-12-07
- Hard to visually tell function calls apart from plain data lists2016-03-26
- Constantly struggles to satisfy the compiler instead of implementing concepts directly2014-02-10
- Hard to debug, so simple print-statement debugging does not work as expected2013-01-10
- Fragmented Scheme ecosystem with varying implementations and SRFIs is confusing to newcomers2009-04-07
- Requires much more typing and is harder to remember than Ruby2009-03-24