Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python (2009)

> Nowadays you muck around with incomprehensible or nonexistent man pages for software you don’t know who wrote. You have to do basic science on your libraries to see how they work, trying out different inputs and seeing how the code reacts.

Probably the best way, and maybe the only way, to learn this is by doing it. That's how I learned it, with no formal training in programming.

What I learned from SICP and Sussman's other books I would never have figured out any other way. I don't think the world is really as different as Sussman says it is here, and I think the programming world lost something special with this change.

The book lives on anyway, and he'll always be one of my heroes.

Absolutely agreed. This situation reminds me of discourse on learning natural languages, where people are constantly told that there is no substitute for time spent deliberately on immersion. But you won't accurately figure out grammatical structures that way; you'll get distracted by the parts you understand and fail to assemble them into a whole.

University (and earlier!) courses ought to focus on the kinds of things that actually require direction to learn.