There is definitely a split between the people who think it's interesting to program in Scheme and the people who think it's interesting to program <i>a</i> Sch

There is definitely a split between the people who think it's interesting to program in Scheme and the people who think it's interesting to program <i>a</i> Scheme (particularly to do so in Scheme itself). For the second group, the Scheme language is more of an aesthetic object than a programming language. The length argument is also a stand-in for the argument about Common Lisp versus Scheme. CL is pretty carefully defined, so the CL spec is pretty long, and some Schemers used this as an argument against CL (that it was bloated). Now suddenly the Scheme spec was also long, so that argument was gone.