>>14
What, you think Scheme will clutter your head? It's one of the smallest non-joke languages there are, made for pedagogy and renowned for its minimalism. Besides, most languages will be more awkward to use while exploring the techniques in the book due to their more limited support for first-class functions, or their botched scoping rules. And let's not say anything about tail call optimization (because it's not really
that relevant).
And not that it actually matters when talking about SICP, but Scheme is not really dead, at least in a way. Racket has a thriving community, and if you take further distance from Scheme's lineage, Clojure is full of hype still and runs on the JVM.