@hugoestr a friend of mine who studied physics at berkley who is also an emacs nerd was like, "I'm gonna read SICM" a couple months ago, and I spoke to him recently and he was like "oof, it's a lot, I'm gonna need more time and space before I dig in"

I think we should be honest that Sussman's work is hard. Some people act like its easy, and I think they either aren't really reading in a serious way, or are rare hacker savants. But I think the attitude of treating it like its easy drives people away, because they pickup SICP and then one of the first excerises basically asks you to prove Ackermann's function without being told thats what you're doing, and then they think theres something about themselves and lisp that doesn't click but, no. It's difficult stuff. If you stick with it, it will take you further in a year's time than the five years prior — theres no other books that are so comprehensive & so self-contained — but it gets very hard, with sequences of back-to-back hard exercises, a few times in every chapter. Lots of gotchas in SICP as well, that can be frustrating if you're someone who has trouble moving on without arriving at a solution on your own.