A 'just-screwed-enough-to-still-be-usable' version of Scheme is apparently a reasonable recipe for success in the PL design world: JavaScript and R have a genes

A 'just-screwed-enough-to-still-be-usable' version of Scheme is apparently a reasonable recipe for success in the PL design world: JavaScript and R have a genesis in common. I have to say that I long for an array language that's closer to original Scheme (for the boilerplate parts of statistical programming) or/and APL (for purely statistical stuff). Regarding the typing story, I think a contract system (R has libs for that) rather than static types would be far better. Nice as they are, dependent types are not easy to use, and pretty much a nightmare for exploratory statistical work. Since most of the runtime is spent iterating on vectors anyways, contracts would IMO have a much better usability story.