Here's a good quote from the paper "... sicp suffers from a serious flaw. While the course briefly explains programming as the definition of some recursive procedures, it does not discuss how programmers determine which procedures are needed or how to organize these procedures. While it explains that programs benefit from functions as first-class values, it does not show how programmers discover the need for this power. While SICP introduces the idea that programs should use abstraction layers, it never mentions how or when programmers should introduce such layers of abstraction. Finally, while the book discusses the pros and cons of stateful modularity versus stream-based modularity, it does so without explaining how to recognize situations in which one is more useful than the other."