I didn't do much work in Chicken, but I chose it as a language for ops scripts that were to run on any old Unix box whose installed software I couldn't control,

I didn't do much work in Chicken, but I chose it as a language for ops scripts that were to run on any old Unix box whose installed software I couldn't control, e.g. AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, RHEL 5. Couldn't even count on Python 2 being there. It was either POSIX shell or statically linked native, and Chicken (with a few modifications) allowed me to do that on all of the above platforms. Fortunately (in retrospect), none of my code ever found much use. Learned a lot about Scheme, though :)