[caiocaiocaio]

A long essay could be written about that. A few quick things. There's Scheme's simple syntax, which doesn't get in the way of what the book is actually teaching. The fact that, of the mainstream programming languages, Javascript is the most crufty and full of gotchas, with all kinds of weird, unexpected behaviours even experienced developers can't always keep track of, many caused by bugs in the first version. Javascript's tendency to fail quietly when other languages would shoot out error messages makes it an awful language to experiment and play around in. Javascript Stockholm Syndrome. Decades of tradition. The entire last section of the book's intimate relationship with Scheme.

The fact that this is a book about learning to program, not about maximizing your potential for jobs. It's a compsci book to learn to be a good programmer, not a book about synergizing industry trends to build your resume.

When SICP was written, most people still wrote in Assembly for most things but COBOL, ADA, and old-school FORTRAN were also popular. Part of the longevity of the book is its appropriate choice of language.

Would it be as enlightening to write a series of JS compilers in JS? Or are they writing Lisp compilers in JS? Doesn't that miss the entire point of the book?