The first reason why I really loved SICP is that it is based on Scheme, a language with powerful primitives. I came from a self-taught world of PL/1, Algol, C,

The first reason why I really loved SICP is that it is based on Scheme, a language with powerful primitives. I came from a self-taught world of PL/1, Algol, C, then later C++, Java etc. None of them had closures, hygienic macros, anonymous functions, functional programming, call/cc, and of course, "amb", the non-deterministic choice operator. At an even more basic level, SICP taught me that a lot of non-trivial code can be written with just sequences and maps, with good enough efficiency! Because SICP's starting point was so high, they could describe many concepts easily from the ground up, from object oriented programming, backtracking, constraint programming and non-determinism. This taught me a number of techniques to apply in real-life, because I could readily identify the missing building blocks in the language or system I was given to work with. For example, I was able to build a lightweight threads system in Java quite readily because I knew that the missing piece was a continuations feature in Java. See https://github.com/kilim/kilim https://github.com/kilim/kilim