Comment by systemBuilder

I had been programming profesionally for 3 years (since age 15) when I took "SICP" at MIT in 1980 (we used LISP; Scheme would come a few years later). The course is designed to appeal to the ego of the professors who teach it, and it is designed to mold MIT students into AI researchers which is the whole point of the MIT curriculum - -

1. They taught a bunch of extremely advanced concepts like infinite lists of prime numbers where the 'CAR' and 'CDR' functions could be used to iterate down the list, which calculates the next prime number on-demand.

2. At the end of the course, they made the horrific mistake of encouraging students how to write their programs in LISP and then embed the LISP code into other languages, such as Algol, which produces the most extreme spaghetti code in the history of mankind!

The problem with SICP is that it teaches many advanced language concepts but the students are unprepared to absorb them and haven't ever struggled with the types of problems these advanced concepts are meant to solve! It's like showing a peasant farmer how to drive a modern combine before they've ever tried ploughing their field with a horse plough! I can pretty safely say, as a systems programmer, I have used exactly zero of the concepts taught in SICP back in 1980.

But most importantly, when professors teach SICP, they can feel good about themselves because they get the misguided impression that they are teaching something that grows their student's capabilities as a programmer and when talking to other professors teaching introductory computer science, the SICP professsors can say, "look at this cool shit my students did - i bet your students wish they could write shit as cool as this!" - end of story.

Incidentally, I never went to class and got an "A" in the class. It was annoying to have to take this remedial brainwashing class after already taking 2 other CS classes (including introduction to programming and assembly language programming) at the University of Illinois.