My only critic about SICP is the fondness for arithmetic/analysis in problem sets. For EE it's obviously normal. For pure programming it's an unnecessary requirement/burden (unless you love maths). HtDP is better in that regard.
Many of the illustrations are based on mathematics and a lot of problems require a decent amount of mathematical maturity to tackle. I think it’s a great book for anyone decently mathematically competent but for people who don’t really know what to write when asked for a proof, I think it’s a lot more difficult.
Apart from the mathematics based examples, a lot of the way things are explained is not very related to actual machines and relies a lot on abstract symbol manipulation, something that is easy not to notice if one is used to mathematics, but is often very difficult if one is not.
> For pure programming it's an unnecessary requirement/burden (unless you love maths). HtDP is better in that regard.
I disagree strongly on that assertion. The mathematics in SICP was what made it stand out for me, and what got me into programming. Other books I read before that just presented programming as an opaque thing where you follow instructions and write incantations without any rhyme or reason.
In general terms, the math-phobia that has been prevalent in computer programming for the past 20 years is a new phenomenon (I have not seen it in literature from the 1990s or earlier, or heard it from old-school programmers and CS people) and is at its core deeply anti-intellectual. An example of this dumbing down is the current crop of JavaScript "devs." This runs all the way to the semantics of the language: one of the most idiotic decision made in JavaScript is overloading '+' to concatenate strings. Commutativity? Associativity? Algebra? Get out of here with this math nonsense.
You read me wrong, i said arithmetic/analysis. To encode, resolve a problem with a computer you need no knowledge of convergent square Root approximation (an exercise early on)
