Scheme was developed by Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman at MIT in 1975 as a minimalist Lisp dialect.
The language began as an experiment connected with artificial-intelligence research and the study of programming-language semantics. Steele and Sussman aimed to create a small, elegant language whose features could be understood from a compact set of rules.
Scheme became notable for lexical scoping, first-class procedures, and its use of proper tail calls. These features made it influential in teaching computer science and in research on interpreters and programming-language design. Its simple syntax uses parenthesized expressions, like other Lisp-family languages.
Scheme is sometimes confused with Common Lisp, but they are separate languages. Scheme has remained standardized through successive reports, including the influential Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme, commonly abbreviated RnRS.