Looks like another face of a centuries-old debate between theoretical and experimental science. The theoretical scientists play with abstractions they fully un

Looks like another face of a centuries-old debate between theoretical and experimental science. The theoretical scientists play with abstractions they fully understand. Experimental scientists poke at things they don’t fully understand. They tend not to do well with each other. When computers were in the infancy, they were viewed primarily as a scientific tools to crunch numbers and play with abstraction. That’s the theory-oriented view that I think is shared by the SICP authors. Then computers became complex, fast, and capable of doing much more than crunching numbers and evaluating those S-expressions. While you can view a modern web browser, or MS Word, or a videogame, as a program for a Turing complete machine, this does not mean you should. Too little value in that: sure there’re instructions and state, but now what? More experiment-oriented mindset usually works better with those kind of problems.