> it feels like as I've never seen code once in my lifetime. I think you must be fixating on syntax, or have been seeing some code that is advanced or (it exis

> it feels like as I've never seen code once in my lifetime. I think you must be fixating on syntax, or have been seeing some code that is advanced or (it exists) a very confusing example by some academic to demonstrate some curiosity. Except for idiomatic recursion (which you don't have to use), Scheme semantics should initially look familiar to a Python or JavaScript programmer, like a subset of that, just with a different syntax. (Scheme nuances are much better designed, but to a new programmer semantics will look like a subset.) And the Scheme syntax is one of the simplest ever, once you understand it. What should instead be confusing is a language with very different semantics, like lazy evaluation, or an OOPL with complicating dispatch rules to reason about.