#1 is definitely not meh, it's actually really practical if you're doing real work in Lisp. It seems meh if you're doing academic "basic CS concepts" exercises in Lisp, though.

> #3 re Python (and intial mention that languages arent written in themselves) just sounds like author is not up to date with modern python.

    Python 2.7.1 (r271:86832, Nov 27 2010, 18:30:46) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)] on win32
    Type "copyright", "credits" or "license()" for more information.
    
    >>> def foo():
    	x = 0
    	def bar(y):
    		x += y
    		return x
    	return bar
    
    >>> baz = foo()
    >>> baz(3)
    
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<pyshell#10>", line 1, in <module>
        baz(3)
      File "<pyshell#7>", line 4, in bar
        x += y
    UnboundLocalError: local variable 'x' referenced before assignment

Is 2.7.1 not "modern" enough? I was under the impression that a lot of people are still on 2.7 rather than switching to Python 3. (I switched to Lua for scripting; it has working closures, lambdas, tail recursion, etc.)