[jacoblyles]

Everything is hard in Scheme/LISP world. As a first programming project for an isolated person without collaborators or teachers, SICP is death. It will be months before the autodidact can accomplish something that he can feel proud of. Nothing will kill interest faster than beating your head against the wall in isolation for months in your spare time without any tangible progress.

I believe people that say it's awesome and I look forward to tackling it someday. But it is not a good way for a person to dip his first toe into programming.

[hga]

I think it's worth trying for a couple of weeks. If it doesn't start to click, then come back after a few years of imperative programming, at which time it won't be as easy as you'd expect (or so it is reported) since you have to learn the very different functional paradigm, but you'll appreciate it all the more having accumulated plenty of scars from side effect caused bugs.

That said, if you have something you want to build starting with a project and an appropriate language and ecosystem (including instructional material) is very good. I myself started out in a high school punched card IBN 1130 FORTRAN "IV" course, but soon started a project that really got me going.

I didn't try SICP until half a decade later; by then I was an experienced imperative language programmer (mostly C by that point) and fairly experienced in Maclisp and Lisp Machine Lisp. At which point it really made sense, both in terms of being able to understand the material and why it was really important.

[jules]

This is not at all what doing SICP was like for me. It was fun. There is an interesting idea on every page. The exercises are challenging and interesting.