[mattjones]

There's a place in the comments of the last article in this series where a guy called Tony says, "I have one word: Scheme." And chromatic replies, "I wonder if a language that sticks so closely to the lambda calculus is comprehensible to non-math geeks."

This kind of perspective (chromatic's) is a problem. The thing is, programming languages with the property that you can build powerful abstractions and still keep the program comprehensible and maintainable almost certainly will be closely coupled with some areas of mathematics. Things with such powerful and peculiar properties usually are.

It doesn't mean that the thing in question can only appeal to math geeks. One thing you can do with Scheme's abstraction power is build abstractions that do not seem especially mathematical.