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.

>>50
http://projectfortress.sun.com/Projects/Community/blog/ObjectOrientedTailRecursion
Yes, that's it.

And it's absolutely hilarious when you actually think about it rather relying on Guy's authority.

As soon as any of his objects is written in a way that does not permit TCO, purely syntactically, like when the dude just wanted to assign the result to a variable and then return the variable, and his abstraction disappears in a puff of decaying unrealistic expectations.

His interface does not encapsulate the thing he relies on, the TCO. His belief that it would be applied through the whole chain goes completely on faith, absolutely not specified for the compiler and not checked for at all.

So I still stick to my original opinion: his example would be better off with an explicit traversal strategy, where it would be immediately obvious that when a set can't just return a value in response to a certain query, then something is wrong, and when the direct implementation for that case would not be TCOed as well, only silently.