Comment by constantcrying
11 days ago
I always dislike it when people emphasize "applications", as if those were the only valuable things to learn. Nothing in my professional and academic life has been as valuable, as a strong conception of various theoretical concepts.
What SICP is about, is programming theory. How data structures can be formed and manipulated to solve abstract problems and how these programs are executed.
Sure, nothing in this book will tell you the best way to program a video game, but the presented concepts are of genuine importance and can be seen in a wide area of circumstances. Ultimately the book want's you to think more abstractly, which is great way to understand things.
GP mentality is prevalent and the reason why the "big ball of mud" article and the "worse is better" blog post are so relevant. People don't want to understand computers and computation they just want to get some stuff done. Companies just want to put out a product. They never seem to realize that following their noses and not thinking too much about the underlying tools is what landed us with this mess of ever changing, overly complex frameworks and nightmarish levels of insecurity increasingly surrounding more and more critical infrastructure.
It's more like SICP is a bad intro but a great outro to programming studies. First get some simpler basics allowing you to understand what can be done with computing and apply to some of your hobby ideas, then dive deep to actual low-level details and various approaches to understand all the trade-offs and applicability of each. Overwhelming freshmen with SICP is not the right approach for most.
I ought to think university aged adults should be on the point of doing deep conceptual dives on the fields they chose... dive deeper into. I get what you're saying and it makes sense given the realities of CS programs. But I can't help but feeling that freshmen being overwhelmed by SICP is a symptom of a problem and not some limitation of the young adult mind.