[neilk]

Yes, not even the authors of SICP defend it as a good introductory text any more. They have observed that their students don't graduate into a world where they program using the pure, low-level constructs taught in SICP. Instead they have to grapple with layers and layers of APIs written by other people, and messy real-world problems. These require different skills, and it's not bad to have to learn them in school.

Still, SICP is one of the greatest computer science texts ever written, precisely because the learning curve is about as steep as it gets. Each chapter builds on the last, and by chapter three you're learning concepts that clarify some of the thorniest issues you will ever face in an average programming career. Even if you don't get to use a language like Scheme, it's sad if you don't know what SICP has to say about these problems.