It's a shame that Berkeley dropped Scheme in favour of Python. In the words of the former CS61a teacher, Brian Harvey, who's retiring [1]:
"In an ironic development, while the Berkeley CS faculty pretty clearly regard the Python-based course as the future of 61A for Berkeley CS students, both the UC Online people and the team at Stanford developing technology for massive online courses are excited about adapting 61AS to their formats. So, down the road, it may be that everyone except Berkeley students can study SICP."
An also[2]:
"You can learn to program in any language. But it’s not just an accident that the authors of SICP chose Scheme as their teaching language. The big ideas in the book — the ones that alumni in the real world tell us they’re using in their work — express themselves best in Scheme. Indeed, saying it that way puts the matter backward. Gerry Sussman (with Guy Steele) invented Scheme before he turned (with Hal Abelson) to expressing the ideas behind Scheme in a course. SICP is Scheme, in tutorial form."
BTW, if you have some free time and want to learn Lisp, do yourself a favour and go watch the old Scheme-based lectures on Berkeley's webcast; they're awesome.
PS. I do most of my professional work in Python.
[1] http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/retire.html
[2] http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/proglang.html
"In an ironic development, while the Berkeley CS faculty pretty clearly regard the Python-based course as the future of 61A for Berkeley CS students, both the UC Online people and the team at Stanford developing technology for massive online courses are excited about adapting 61AS to their formats. So, down the road, it may be that everyone except Berkeley students can study SICP."
An also[2]:
"You can learn to program in any language. But it’s not just an accident that the authors of SICP chose Scheme as their teaching language. The big ideas in the book — the ones that alumni in the real world tell us they’re using in their work — express themselves best in Scheme. Indeed, saying it that way puts the matter backward. Gerry Sussman (with Guy Steele) invented Scheme before he turned (with Hal Abelson) to expressing the ideas behind Scheme in a course. SICP is Scheme, in tutorial form."
BTW, if you have some free time and want to learn Lisp, do yourself a favour and go watch the old Scheme-based lectures on Berkeley's webcast; they're awesome.
PS. I do most of my professional work in Python.
[1] http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/retire.html
[2] http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/proglang.html