[craigsmansion]

> Back in the 80s, most programming was done from first principles

That's one of the secret revelations in SICP. If you go in with some knowledge of assembly or C, you can quickly feel it's really high-level and not all that fundamental.

That is, until it addresses your precious "fundamental" bits and bytes, and you suddenly realise the model it is showing you is a model you can build computational platforms with, including your up-to-then understanding of registers and ALUs, and it illustrates that computing essentially has nothing to do with any specific hardware: all you need is pencil and paper and the command of a natural language, but with some parenthesis, you can optionally instruct a machine to do it for you as a bonus.

> it is not what beginners need because most of them will never end up programming like that.

which makes any "SICP in X" effort so useless: "let's make SICP understandable for people who do not want to understand it."