I got in touch with Scheme twenty years ago. Read the specification (R5RS) and that was the first time programming in Lisp made sense to me. Because the specifi

I got in touch with Scheme twenty years ago. Read the specification (R5RS) and that was the first time programming in Lisp made sense to me. Because the specification was so short, I could remember every detail after a short time. Also the syntax was so predictable unlike Common Lisp with its myriad of operations. Without reading too many books about Scheme I started programming in it. Learned about tail recursion. About destructive vs non destructive operations. About functions that always returned values. Then I got in touch with SICP ("Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"). Man, that book was a revelation. Scheme was a breathe of fresh air coming from C/Pascal/Java. It was a totally different way to tell the computer what I wanted to do (although I had similar thoughts several years earlier programming my HP28s calculator in a Forth like language, then later when I started using Mathematica).