Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python (2009)

There's probably a middle ground somewhere. IMHO, SICP leans a little too heavily on the homoiconicity of Scheme for its choice of exercises. Which is intellectually nifty but it could also include exercises from something like Crafting Interpreters (Nystrom) where you would build up step-by-step to an interpreter of a non-Scheme-like language, using Scheme.

Eh, being able to skip parsing allows a fairly short book to spend more time on its real focus than it otherwise would.