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Why "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" matters (2011)

2011, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of MIT, the Boston Globe made a list of the most important innovations developed there. They asked me to explain the importance of SICP, and this is what I sent them: SICP was revolutionary in many different ways.

Brian HarveyUniversity of California, Berkeley In 2011, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of MIT, the Boston Globe made a list of the most important innovations developed there. Scheme is a dialect of Lisp, so it's great at handling functions as data, but it's a stripped-down version compared to the ones more commonly used for professional programming, with a minimum of bells and whistles. The text itself isn't easy reading; it has none of the sidebars and colored boxes and interesting pictures that typify the modern textbook aimed at students with low attention spans.

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