That may be, but it was still incredibly dense and challenging for me when I found a discarded copy in the 3rd year of my 4-year computer science degree, when I was already quite familiar with Java/C/Python-esque imperative code and somewhat familiar with Lisp.
SICP is taught to freshmen in UC Berkeley and MIT in their "CS 101" classes. I mean, most of these classes are "translated" to Python but still it is SICP and it has Scheme parts for things you can't do in Python. As a lisp enthusiast, and having learned programming with SICP, I believe it's possible.
I’ll go further at Indiana Univeristy when I attended the cs 101 was taught sicp style. The cs 101 equivalent for non-majors was not & was taught in c++.
I entered as a non-major so did it in c++ first. It only clicked when I went back to sicp. Could just be having done the material twice but I’ve always understood most cs concepts in a functional sense more easily.
