Scheme had a very shallow standard. It's written in a dense style and lacked basic stuff like error handling or an object system.
> I'm still not sure why there are 80 different ways to loop
There are many ways to loop, because users found those useful. Lisp by tradition is not telling the developers what they have to use. It's the opposite: it gives the developers various degrees of freedom to shape the language (from macros, read macros, ... to the MOP).
You could have easily removed something like DOLIST from the standard. But why? Software before and after the standard will still use it. How about MAP ? Remove it! But wait, people have used it already and will still use it...
Lisp languages are ball-of-mud languages where users can add their own control structures.
If you look at Scheme, they have added all this and more with SRFIs. Now you get a language, whose implementations support a minimal language and each will implement some subset or superset of SRFIs...
> I'm still not sure why there are 80 different ways to loop
There are many ways to loop, because users found those useful. Lisp by tradition is not telling the developers what they have to use. It's the opposite: it gives the developers various degrees of freedom to shape the language (from macros, read macros, ... to the MOP).
You could have easily removed something like DOLIST from the standard. But why? Software before and after the standard will still use it. How about MAP ? Remove it! But wait, people have used it already and will still use it...
Lisp languages are ball-of-mud languages where users can add their own control structures.
If you look at Scheme, they have added all this and more with SRFIs. Now you get a language, whose implementations support a minimal language and each will implement some subset or superset of SRFIs...