I think &quot;it&#x27;s hard to read code in a language you don&#x27;t know.&quot;<p>You&#x27;re fooled on this because so many languages are so similar -- if you know C++, you can trivially read Java and C# and Python, and even languages that are a bit further afield like Javascript and Perl still are heavily influenced by C, so don&#x27;t seem too odd.<p>But Scheme is a whole new family of languages. It&#x27;s like being an English reader and looking at Greek text as opposed to Spanish. It&#x27;s not that Greek is harder than Spanish, it&#x27;s that Spanish is closer to what you already know.