Scheme is a small language as well, and it is worlds better for teach abstract concepts. I've heard this claim many, many times, but for me, I find Scheme (and

Scheme is a small language as well, and it is worlds better for teach abstract concepts. I've heard this claim many, many times, but for me, I find Scheme (and Haskell, for that matter) impossible to work with. I love what Scheme and Haskell do in theory, but in practice, I find them unusable for those things. With Scheme and Haskell, I find I'm always trying to figure out how I should make the compiler happy, vs. taking an abstract concept that I understand well and just implementing it, which is something I find easy to do with C. But I also suck at math, and my assumption is that for people who don't suck at math, Haskell and Scheme and all the others are probably easier, and that makes sense to me.