Should I learn LISP first, or learn LISP through SICP?
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Anonymous2013-07-06 15:24
SICP is a starter book for people exploring Computer Science.
It doesn't teach programming per se, but some principles and algorithms.
It does have some value for students, but it instills some inefficient and inferior practices with dependence on Scheme, that makes you a bad programmer(especially if you program "by the book").
I would advice taking the SICP abstractions with a grain of salt, and think of the lower-level code these abstractions run on. Providing these abstractions only for reference to learn CS topics does nothing wrong but in the real world there are many alternatives and optimized versions, some of which must be handmade for the program at hand.