Other direction entirely! They're theoretical basics, not implementation basics. :D So f'rex, it takes fifty lines of code in Scheme to define a self-interpreting interpreter - a function that takes code as input and executes the code, which if given itself can execute itself. That means it is also possible to fairly cheaply implement any other language in Scheme - one of the group options for the final project in the course was to implement a simplified Python. :D

(For a long time, my internal metric for how awesome Scheme is was "you can do anything you want to in Scheme, except pointer arithmetic". Then it turned out that, like everything else under the sun, there's a Scheme library for pointer arithmetic. This shit is fucking witchcraft, it's glorious.)