In the 1980s Scheme was not performant enough. C was how you got tolerably fast programs. A lot of research, notably in garbage collection, has made Scheme much more performant since then. Additionally, computer hardware has improved to the point where people write useful programs in languages that are dramatically slower than Scheme, e.g. PHP, Python, Ruby.<p>You are conflating minimalism with the Scheme language because Scheme is often used to illustrate minimalism. Vectors and hash tables are not &quot;all this other stuff&quot;, they&#x27;re part of the language spec[1]. You&#x27;re also throwing Lisp in there even though minimalism is not a central theme of Lisp.<p>[1] When you did SICP hash tables were not part of the language spec although implementations generally had them; they got standardized in 2007 with R6RS. But vectors were in the language spec since at least 1985.