Everyone says SICP is this profound thing but I just couldn't get into it or LISP at all. Am I really missing out on anything after a good CS education and practical experience?
I love SICP and am one of those fanboys who say everyone should read it.
Though, really, a lot of what it covers is much more common knowledge now than it was when I first read it. High-order functions and functions-as-first-class-citizens (ch1) are ubiquitous and most programmers I know are comfortable with them (which wasn't the case in the early 2000s, at least in my circle). Lists, maps, pairs, and symbolic structures are covered in ch2, but most people are comfortable thinking in such terms now. Ch3 covers handling state, and I think there are good ideas in that chapter that still haven't been broadly disseminated.
But where the book really shines is the last 2 chapters - I haven't seen much of those ideas (virtual register machine and writing a compiler for it) covered elsewhere. It's still a great way to get exposed to some fundamentals of computing from a pure software environment. But I think you could be quite a capable programmer without ever doing that.
>Am I really missing out on anything after a good CS education
I don't think you can have a good software education, in the sense of having a complete one, without studying LISP. It's a foundational paradigm of programming. It's kind of like studying physics and skipping Maxwell's equations, paraphrasing Alan Kay.
It's a good way to nail down a lot of the fundamentals, on top of which a good CS education can be built.
So if you already have a solid CS education it's not really necessary, except maybe for the enjoyment of reading a really well thought through pedagogical work. Which can sometimes help coalesce concepts and the connections between them.
You could give Concrete Abstractions* a try, I consider it to be the intermediate part between the Little Seasoned Schemer and SICP. As for whether you're really missing out on anything depends on how good your good CS education was.
Just read it like a novel. Ignore the exercises. What struck me that it took 8 or 9 chapters until they even presented a loop, and it was none the worse for doing that. Actually helped my imperative lizard brain evolve.
Yes, its a book that uses lisp, but its not a lisp book. Its about programming techniques, i felt.
Of all the books that are usually recommended to be read and nobody actually does, this is the one that i actually read and liked.
