My experience is the opposite: I only appreciated the marvel of SICP (at least that's how I experienced it at the time) because I already knew other programming

My experience is the opposite: I only appreciated the marvel of SICP (at least that's how I experienced it at the time) because I already knew other programming languages. Something "clicked" that didn't click before. I have the feeling that students with no previous programming experience didn't feel this. If that's true, it also makes sense to start with Python and move SICP to later in the program.