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.

The whole reason of not providing TCO on Python is somewhat stupid. In CL, the standard doesn't require TCO, but most implementations provide it, and the user can turn it on/off (implementation-specific), that way, you can see full backtraces when you want them, or only perform TCO locally on some functions, or globally if you wish, or turn off TCO on some piece of code, and so on. It's always the user's choice. I don't see why Python couldn't take such an approach, but then that would go against that silly rule of THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY TO DO IT.