ADDED BEFORE PUBLICATION: This isn’t really a Red Meat Friday item but the content could be considered controversial and it is Friday so if you’ve been yearning for another Red Meat Friday post, you’re welcome.
I’ve been dithering on whether or not to comment on this for a couple of weeks. On the one hand, it makes the beautiful and important SICP available to those for whom Scheme is too scary—although I’d argue that JavaScript is by far the scarier language—and brings its important lessons and techniques to a wider audience. Those of you who have read Irreal for a while know that I consider SICP to be arguably the best book ever written on Computer Science. Certainly, it’s among the best so I’m happy to see its wisdom spread wider.
On the other hand, it does seem like sacrilege. It’s not unlike rendering Beethoven’s Fifth as Heavy Metal. Sure, you can do it and some people will probably like it but somehow it just doesn’t seem right. Commenters on the current programming language landscape can’t seem to agree on whether JavaScript or PHP is the worst widely used language but JavaScript is certainly in the running so it is a shame to replace the small, well-defined and elegant Scheme with it.
None of the above, by the way, is to disparage the work by those who worked on the project. It obviously took a lot of effort and, from my brief skimming of the results, they did a good job. Still, I just can’t get over the notion that it’s blasphemy.