I'm going to support mahmud here, and suggest that your behavior is the least constructive in this particular sub-thread. He's absolutely right that Lisp is simple and the basic rules can be picked up in an hour or two. He's also right that over the course of a career in computing, you'll have to pick up countless formalisms and languages. Additionally, SICP is not for the faint of heart. It is not an easy text, and the use of Lisp is fairly central to its main point. This is not to say that computing shouldn't be accessible. It definitely should be. That being said, SICP covers intrinsically "difficult" material. There's no substitute for an iota of determination here. If you don't have the determination (not intelligence) to be bothered to learn Lisp, you're not going to be able to complete SICP. It's not going to happen.