Z:gnu-www-ja-rms-lisp--f8238c-At the time, =3Cacronym title=3D"T/en

At the time, TCL was being pushed heavily for this purpose. I had a very low opinion of TCL, basically because it wasn't Lisp. It looks a tiny bit like Lisp, but semantically it isn't, and it's not as clean. Then someone showed me an ad where Sun was trying to hire somebody to work on TCL to make it the &ldquo;de-facto standard extension language&rdquo; of the world. And I thought, &ldquo;We've got to stop that from happening.&rdquo; So we started to make Scheme the standard extensibility language for GNU. Not Common Lisp, because it was too large. The idea was that we would have a Scheme interpreter designed to be linked into applications in the same way TCL was linked into applications. We would then recommend that as the preferred extensibility package for all GNU programs.