SICP

Say, someone who has no prior experience with programming, and is at a rather 'young' age (Teen still) wants to get ahead of the game, and start up now, rather than later. Would one go about this by reading SICP? I've seen it linked so many times, I've only got to think it's a start.

I don't want to turn this into a why python is awesome/shit thread. So I'll post this, you can respond (if you want to) and then we leave it at that.

>>35
The backtrace myth has already been argued extensively elsewhere and I'm not going to bother repeating it.
FSMs were an example, another is that they preserve proper object oriented abstractions as you do not need to peek behind the interfaces to prevent stack overflows.

Name mangling always was and always will be a hack and relies on you playing nice, which undermines the whole encapsulation point. We complain about it in languages like C which don't have namespaces, why shouldn't we complain about it in python.