Ugh I love that book but also completely accurate.

It’s an absolute trip that that SICP was used as an introductory text to computer science. What a bunch of absolute legends.

Fun fact, there’s about 350 homework problems in the book, so if you do one a day you’ll finish the book in a year. Trust me, it’s absolutely worth it! After that year it felt like I truly understood all this programming stuff (and this was after a 4 year degree and working as a software engineer for 4 years). The difference before and after was like turning on a light switch in my brain. I improved 5x in that year alone.

It’s hard though, don’t be ashamed to look up other answers if you get stuck. There’s dozens of blogs where people explain every single answer in detail. I had to look up at least 25% of them. Still worth it, best learning investment ever for my career. I seriously think if I’d not done that I’d have left the industry long ago.

Also don’t forget to check out the lectures on YouTube. Although to be honest I’ve not finished them, video lectures bore me too much. They are still really cool to watch.

I still think back to how it felt doing that book and finishing it. I wish I could go back and do it again for the first time. Just so immensely satisfying and empowering. I’ve tried to find other books like it, nothing quite does the trick. Sigh.

Bootstrapping! Using your non-native compiler to compile a compiler written in the language your compiler parses!