Yes, the differences are significant. The least reason is tail-call. The point is that Clojure is a very different language, abstracting many of the things that

Yes, the differences are significant. The least reason is tail-call. The point is that Clojure is a very different language, abstracting many of the things that aren't abstracted in Scheme. The idea of the book (at least in my interpretation) is that you are given a language with the absolute bare-minimum needed to built programs, thus why you can "learn Scheme in an afternoon." All of these things like (filter), hash-maps, dicts, etc, that we use and take for granted in our programs simply do not exist in Scheme unless you build it yourself. In Scheme, you have to build up all the tools you need by creating your abstractions. To do this in Clojure (or any language) you have to ignore the abstractions you are given, and often must break the abstractions to create the abstractions you are already given. Think of it this way. If you are going to be learning how to create and explore algorithms for matrix multiplication, would you prefer to use Mathematica or Python without Numpy?