I’ll stick my neck out and say SICP has never been relevant to me. I’ve tinkered from embedded, to OS, to databases, to desktop applications, drivers, compilers, web applications, and all sorts of shit inbetween when I’m not reversing some archaic binary compiled in a pre-standard C++. I’ve done both idiomatic programming in a language as well as applying idioms from other languages that I liked. I’ve turned C# into Lisp because it couldn’t do what I needed it to do. I read through ARM opcode docs while I’m daydreaming of writing Ruby.

When I looked at SICP I saw one thing: an introduction to “thinking about programming” for people who will have to re-learn everything and will maybe use a few things here and there. The fundamentals matter but the application is the “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face” phase of actual learning. There are much better ways to go about studying and learning and I found SICP lacking, among other course work that I think is taught backwards and makes it hard to reason and apply.

Read “Great Programmers” by Bram Cohen. The wisdom is there, but it’s lost on people.

Just my 2c.