IT lexicon Programming SICP

SICP Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Programming På svenska → Updated: 2026-07-29

The textbook by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman (1985, second edition 1996). Course book for MIT's 6.001. Known as the wizard book after its cover.

It isn't about Scheme; it uses Scheme to get away with minimal syntax: abstraction, higher-order functions, data abstraction, state and time, streams, a metacircular evaluator (a Lisp interpreter written in Lisp) and finally a register machine with a compiler. MIT replaced the course in 2008 with a Python-based one, arguing that programming today is more about combining libraries you don't fully understand than building everything from the ground up. A JavaScript edition arrived in 2022. The book is freely available online.

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