Scheme (now known as
Racket for some silly reason) is actually a version of one of the oldest computer languages we have—
Lisp. Google around for its history, it's impressive. Regards your question of more like a spreadsheet than run the answer is a good solid 'sorta'! Without getting too deep,
Lisp is what we language geeks call
Functional, while languages like
Basic are
Imperative. So
Basic has commands that you string together, do this, do that, do the other thing. Now go back and do it again etc. If you can follow a recipe, you can learn to program
Basic.
Lisp, not so much. The idea that it is just a calculator usually come from most peoples first introduction. Something like:
or:
Nothing that looks like commands, just a kind of backward calculator thingy. On the other hand, you can also say something like:
> (cdr (cons (cons 4 5) (cons 6 7)))