Everything Is Just Functions: 1 week with David Beazley and SICP

I've watched the actual SICP lectures before (the 1986 recordings on MIT OCW). They're often praised for the information density, but it actually still wastes a lot of time listening to students' Q&A, the lecturers drawing the class' attention to various attempts at "multimedia" presentation in the classroom, simply not having the entire lesson plan worked out in advance (i.e., not being able to preempt the Q&A) etc. For that matter, the sheer amount of time spent on writing things on a chalkboard really adds up.

And of course the order of the material could be debated and rearranged countless ways. One of my future planned projects is to do my own video series presenting the material according to my own sensibilities.

It's nice to hear that the course apparently still stays true to its roots while using more current languages like Python. Python is designed as a pragmatic, multi-paradigm language and I think people often don't give it enough credit for its expressive power using FP idioms (if not with complete purity).

The course is using Python to implement a Scheme, then uses Scheme to implement a Scheme. Python could and should be removed from the course.

Python has very poor support for functional programming. Lists are not cons based, lambdas are crippled, pattern matching is horrible and not even expression based, namespaces are weird.

Python is not even a current language, it is stuck in the 1990s and happens to have a decent C-API that unfortunately fueled its growth at the expense of better languages.