Comment by BeetleB

I won't dispute your experience, but for me the point did hold true. SICP was my first introduction to anything Lisp-like, and by that point I'd done C/C++, a bit of Java, quite a bit of Perl/Python, and of course BASIC.

And I was really surprised how quickly and effortlessly I picked up the part of Scheme taught in the book. Faster than any language I had encountered thus far - Python included.