Chapter 1 of the SICP book says that the main reason it uses Lisp is its convenience in manipulating procedures as data. There is a "JavaScript Edition" of SI

Chapter 1 of the SICP book says that the main reason it uses Lisp is its convenience in manipulating procedures as data. There is a "JavaScript Edition" of SICP. The preface says ECMAScript 2015 enabled a close match by adding lambda expressions, tail recursion, and block-scoped variables and constants. It doesn't mention much downside except that JavaScript's "rigid syntactic structure complicated the implementation" of some programming language design book material.