[chefandy]

Visual symbols could be anything from written words to police uniforms. It's not oversimplifying— it's flat-out wrong. It would be like reading

Expressions representing numbers may be combined with an expression representing a primitive procedure (such as + or *) to form a compound expression that represents the application of the procedure to those numbers.

And an English professor haughtily responding, "you know what that means? 'Computers compute!' This SICP book is just a pile of jargon that could be dramatically simplified!"

His dismissal revealed nothing about the topic, but a whole lot about how so many in the "hard" sciences view others. Don't understand the text? It's the text's fault! For I am a real scientist, and if I don't understand it, it's not understandable!

He might have been a genius, but he should have stuck to subatomic particles and left exploring human behavior up to the people who'd done the prerequisite reading.