SICP Considered Harmful

Its not relevant to the industry, its badly written, and its considered harmful and detrimental to developing the skills of new programmers.  It should only be recommended for its historical value, so pretty much only if you plan to have career in academia.  Instead please recommend a book such as 'The C programming language' to newbies or ex web-designers looking to get a good foundation on the fundamentals.

I don't want to see SICP mentioned around here anymore or you will be reprimanded, please follow the lead of computer science institutions around the world and don't teach SICP anymore.  Thanks, and welcome to 2009.

>>32
I know your trolling, but MIT and other colleges that used to teach Scheme have switched to python.  I'm not aware of any college which still teaches scheme except perhaps Brown.

Scheme and Lisp are ineffective at "building powerful abstractions", as shown by the eventual failings of non-toy programs(see Reddit, which switched to python; Paul Grahams precious yahoo stores). 

Oribtz admitted that much of their LISP code has to be ported to C++(and in 2002 he implies that orbitz is moving away from it all together) due to the failings of the LISP environment, and goes on to explain that the usual programming style in LISP just is not efficient in the real world, and programmers need to be retaught to write efficient lisp.  Specifically they admit that they don't use most of lisps features such as closures, generic functions, complex sequence functions and garbage collection because they are slow.
Source:http://www.paulgraham.com/carl.html

Don't fool yourself >>32 chan . While working at a large financial company I met people from all over the world that write code that was no better or worse than American programmers'.  The primary reason to not out source software is that its a logistical nightmare, most large software companies find it easier to bring people here on H1-B's (although that may change since recent changes have lowered the amount of H1-B's awarded).