My understanding is that SICP was developed as the programming 101 class for MIT. Do students come into programming 101 at MIT never having programmed before? I would suspect that what is a great book for programming 101 for MIT students is not necessarily the right book for those that have not yet been exposed to programming.
I've heard that actually students who had never programmed before did better with SICP than students that had. You have to un-learn a lot of habits from imperative languages when you start working with Scheme. Total novices could take the material as it was presented, but people who had programmed before often tried to shoehorn it into the C/Java/PHP paradigm they'd already experienced and ended up fighting the language.
The same effect worked in reverse as they graduated MIT or worked on projects in more mainstream languages, though. Students would have to unlearn some of the elegant recursive formulations and strong abstraction abilities of Scheme and deal with languages that actually have strong industry adoption. That was a major factor [1] in the replacement of SICP with Python in MIT's intro programming class. Python has abundant library support that more closely mimicks what the programmer will have available and what challenges she'll face in the real world.
I don't disagree that SICP is a better fundamental model than other approaches. I am one of those that was slowed down by learning BASIC as my first language. I was questioning whether or not the typical student learning Programming 101 at MIT is a good template for other students coming into a class with similar goals. I would be surprised if the typical MIT freshman hasn't done some kind of programming in high school or earlier.
