It seems like I can’t spend five minutes on reddit these days without someone playing the JS-is-Scheme is card. I see everything from the innocuous, “JavaScript has a lot in common with Scheme”, all the way up to, “JavaScript is basically Scheme.” This is basically crazy. Or, at least it has a lot in common with crazy.

Before I convince you that it’s crazy, let’s step back a bit and ask why would JS adherents make a statement like this to begin with? You don’t hear people saying, “Yeah, FORTRAN is basically Icon” or “Sather has a really solid SNOBOL core,” do you? Why this arbitrary pairing? After meticulous scientific research, I’ve discovered two historical reasons and one weird psychological one.

A Creation Myth

Way back in the misty primordial days of the web when “under construction” banners were everywhere and wild <font> tags roamed free, there was a mighty programmer named Brendan Eich. There is still a mighty programmer named Brendan Eich, but there was one then too.

He appeared, in a curling cloud of smoke, at the office of Netscape with a moral imperative to bring Scheme to the browser. Alas, the suits shut that shit down for reals, like they do most higher purposes. What he ended up slapping together in ten fevered days instead was JavaScript, a language designed to look like Java and act like anything but.

Given that it didn’t have Java’s semantics, what semantics did it have? Later historiographers started trying to fill in that blank. Since Scheme was Eich’s original BFF , they surmised that’s where it gots its semantics from. The hypothesis was that Eich garbed his creation in a sheepskin of semicolons and curly braces to appease his corporate overlords, but that sexy wolf was inside the whole time.

This is, of course, totally wrong. The animal under that sheepskin is Self, not Scheme. (And it’s a cut-rate knock-off at that, with only single parent delegation.) But who on Earth remembers Self, right? So this is myth numero uno: Eich intended to make Scheme at first, so JavaScript must still have deep Scheme roots hiding in there.

A Savior to Spread the Gospel

That myth wasn’t created until much later, though. Before then, a funny thing happened. One day, Netscape woke up from a truly epic bender to discover it had jammed a scripting language onto the web and millions of people were using it. Literally none of them liked it. Not one.

It was just this weird thing you had to deal with get that awesome rollover over animation to sort-of work on your 640x480 “works best in Netscape 3.0” Geocities page. That drop-down menu ain’t gonna animate itself, you know.

Around that time, this weird guy came along named Douglas Crockford. Unlike most of the teenage amateur-hour web designers at the time (your humble author included), he was an honest-to-God computer whiz. While the rest of us meatheads were using Dreamweaver and notepad, he was probably using emacs, or ed or, who knows, troff. He’d worked in video, and games, and videogames. To further cement his nerd pedigree, he was a bonafide language geek.

Somehow, probably involving alcohol, hard drugs, and a series of lost bets, he went from that auspicious start to end up coding JS. Unlike almost everyone else using JS at the time, he had seen better languages: Scheme, Smalltalk (I think), even E. (The language, not the drug, though I wouldn’t put either past him.)

Usually, touching Scheme or Smalltalk inflicts an incurable disease whose primary symptom is involuntary sneering and derisive snorting in the presence of any other language. Somehow, Crockford managed to fight off his infection, tear into JavaScript, and gaze deep into the abyss at its center. What he claims he saw was a functional language. Scheme to be precise.

He came back from his spirit walk, enscribed his gospels and began proselytizing from the Good Book. He told anyone and everyone, often more than once that:

JavaScript’s C-like syntax, including curly braces and the clunky for statement, makes it appear to be an ordinary procedural language. This is misleading because JavaScript has more in common with functional languages like Lisp or Scheme than with C or Java.

Crockford has a way about him. Part of this is because his background is legimately impressive. He has and continues to do many great things. He is a figurative and literal graybeard, while also staying on the cutting edge. And he has a delivery that is equal parts insight and cranky-but-lovable curmudgeon. In other words, he’s your Dad, and you damn well listen to your Dad when he’s talking to you.

The Huddled Masses

Soon, a new generation of programmers found themselves in a strange position. Many of them had stumbled onto programming as kids right when the web was new. Their first language was the one they already happened to have on their computer: JavaScript. It started as a toy in their youth, yet they found themselves using it professionally years later, despite the fact that no one seemed to take the language seriously.

Put yourself in their shoes (if you aren’t already). Imagine being a construction worker surrounded by big burly dudes, arm hair fluttering in the winds of their swinging hammers. And you’re there pushing in nails using this ragged spit-stained blankey you’ve had since you were a kid. It’s embarrassing, despite the fact that your blanket does actually get those nails in. Somehow.

You feel insecure, a bit of a weakling. You’re a Belieber at a Meshuggah show and what you could really use is some street cred.

In some weird organic process, the pantheon of programming languages have ordered themselves in terms of prestige. It’s as random but undeniable as music and fashion. Radiohead is on one end, and Nickelback is on the other. No one knows precisely how they got there, but there they are.

On the Radiohead end, you’ve got Common Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk, and a few others. Scheme is even more Lisp than Lisp, so it’s like that weird avant garde band no one’s heard of that Radiohead always claims inspired their latest album. If Lisp is Radiohead, Scheme is Kraftwerk.

For all of the people who found themselves using JavaScript but feeling that hot flush of shame, Crockford gave them an answer. JS wasn’t some sell-out radio rock band. It was edgy, obscure. It was Scheme.

Not just that, but it was secretly Scheme. So if you were into JS, not only were you using one of the coolest languages, you were one of the select enlightened few who knew how cool it was. You may be listening to Coldplay, but only because Brian Eno produced it.

This “JS = Scheme” meme was hugely legimitizing to a horde of programmers feeling unsure of themselves in the face of grizzly C programmers who allocated their own damn memory, probably right after building their own computer out of rocks and twigs.

But Is it True?

I may be a bit hyperbolic. Just a tad. But I think that’s roughly how we got here. Lots of programmers believe JavaScript is “basically” Scheme because it gives them something they want to believe: that the language they choose to use has some cachet and they don’t have to feel bad about it anymore. And, honestly, almost no one knows enough Scheme to tell if it’s true or not anyway.

Well I, armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of programming languages and a not-as-dog-eared-as-I’d-like-to-admit copy of SICP, do. We’re gonna put this myth to bed right now. Here’s the defining characterists of Scheme, the stuff whose gestalt makes Scheme special:

I know we could fight about a few things on this list, but I think that’s pretty tight. Now, for JavaScript to be “basically” Scheme, I’d expect a pretty close correspondence there. Of that list, here’s what JS has:

Minimalism. Dynamic typing. First-class functions and closures.

Don’t tell me it’s got lexical scope, because JavaScript’s scoping is an abomination in the face of God. Guy Steele isn’t even dead and JS scope makes him pre-emptively roll in his not-yet-occupied grave. Likewise, claiming JS is homoiconic because you can eval strings of code is nonsense. If that’s the only criteria for homoiconicity, then C is too, since you can treat an array of bytes as code and jump to it.

But, to be fair, it does have some stuff in common. So maybe it’s a fair comparison? I guess the real way to tell would be to compare Scheme to some other languages. The big feature that everyone harps on is closures. Maybe just having closures means you’re basically Scheme.

If that’s true, then C#, Lua, D, Erlang, Haskell, PHP, Scala, Go, Objective-C, Python, Ruby, and Smalltalk are basically Scheme. In other words, if JavaScript is Scheme by that criteria, then every language is Scheme, which of course means none of them are.

This is why the “JS = Scheme” meme drives me crazy: it makes us dumber. It’s a thought-terminating cliché. It carries negative informational content and makes people actually know less about languages than they did before.

If you think JavaScript is one of the most Scheme-like languages out there, then you’re missing out on the fact that Forth is really minimal, Dart has great scoping, Lua does tail call elimination, Haskell and Ruby have continuations, C# has dynamic typing, Io is homoiconic, Go has closures, Scala has macros, and Clojure seriously dislikes mutation.

At the same time, we’re ignoring the things about JavaScript that make it not Scheme. It’s got a much richer syntax including a great notation for data. I’m not a huge fan of prototypes (anymore), but it’s an interesting dispatch model that Scheme doesn’t have.

Equating JavaScript to Scheme does Scheme a disservice, but it does JavaScript one too. If you’re going to be a JavaScript fanboy (fangirl? fanperson?), fine, but be a JavaScript fanboy, not a Scheme-by-proxy one. Telling people it’s “basically Scheme” is still just a way of saying you’re ashamed of it.

If you’re ashamed of JavaScript, don’t use it. (There are plenty of options these days.) And if you do like it, like it for what it is, not the tiny subset of what it is that it has in common with some other random language.