Remember a couple of weeks ago when I declared No. Just no? Well, here’s another, even more emphatic, refusal to accept the apocalypse.
The thing about SICP is how simple and beautiful the code is and how precisely it demonstrates the concepts under discussion. To pretend that you could do the same with JavaScript is self delusion of the first order.
Yeah yeah, I know. There’s more code written in JavaScript than there are atoms in the universe. There are also more Ford Focuses than Rolls Royces. That doesn’t make Focus the better car or JavaScript the better language. More to the point, JavaScript is a bad fit for SICP.
I have long abhorred MIT’s decision to replace SICP with Lego robots or something but this latest outrage is an act of vandalism. If you want to learn the wisdom in SICP then learn Scheme. The whiners notwithstanding, it’s an easy language to learn. Indeed, 6.001, the MIT course in which SICP was used, didn’t have any time devoted to teaching Scheme. Students just picked it up as they went along.
If we’re going to abandon SICP as a teaching vehicle, we should at least let it rest in peace and not desecrate its corpse.