[blahblahblah]

The books that are beloved by practitioners in a field are not always the best choice in terms of pedagogy. Clearly, these professors think that another book choice will help their students really grok the material. If they're successful, great. If they're not, they'll probably recognize it and supplement with other material or switch to another text. It's certainly possible to be a competent programmer without ever having read SICP in the same way that it's possible to learn linear algebra and calculus without ever having read Strang. My CS program didn't use SICP and I don't feel like I really missed anything of critical importance. There are other very competent authors writing other very good textbooks, after all. I was still exposed to Assembly, Fortran, Pascal, C, C++, Java, Scheme, Lisp, and Prolog in my program and learned core concepts of computer science such as asymptotic complexity, recurrence relations, Boolean logic, countability, Turing machines, finite automata, parsers, interpreters, threads, data structures, grammars, Backus-Naur form, etc.