Substancelessness

Again, not much original thought to contribute here.  It's interesting to see how utterly different Lisp/Scheme/Racket are from anything else we've looked at so far.  Conveniently, it feels a lot more natural than I had anticipated.  Looks like the wider use of recursion is really the most potentially mind-boggling trait of all this functional stuff that the book has presented in this first bit of Ch. 15, at least.

In fact, the Lisp/Scheme/Racket stuff may be coming somewhat more easily precisely because it's so foreign.  We're going in with an open mind, y'know?  Related to this idea, Brooks had a nice observation about the issue of thinking in terms of a certain language when you're coding. I wonder if this very problem might have contributed to making Scala seem so difficult.  After all, so much of the syntax was like Java.  And we were working in Eclipse, for which Java programming is the only frame of reference that many of us have.  Maybe that familiarity was more a drawback than an advantage.