The audience of SICP was just the people who were planning to major in EECS at MIT, making it only impractical for, at best, the subset of the major that was in

The audience of SICP was just the people who were planning to major in EECS at MIT, making it only impractical for, at best, the subset of the major that was interested purely in hardware. Having not been privy to the internal discussion that came before the decision to drop SICP at MIT, I can't say I understand why they did it, but my best guess is that it was too hard. It serves as an excellent separate-wheat-from-chaff type of class, but at the cost of decreased enrollment in the major. As far as I'm concerned, though, you can basically ask someone how they liked 6.001, and if they have any positive words, you can pretty much hire them on the spot for any programming job you've got.