James;
A very very simple question and I'm going to completely show myself up here..... What language is ChucK based on? It looks similar to Common Music which is based on Scheme I think? I'm just wondering so I can try understand things better/quicker.
Mostly Java, with the addition of our massively overloaded "=>" operator, which is mostly (rather tasty) syntactic sugar, and our method for timing and concurrency.
Of course modern musical languages will be influenced by the old ones, like Common Music and CSound and you may see traces of that influence but it's really very much unlike something like Scheme. If you keep Java in mind you will mostly be fine. If you keep Scheme in mind and try to write in that style you may get interesting results but after a while I predict brick-walls and disappointments.
Hope that helps.
Kas.