For those who have read it, I'd be interested in knowing what it is that you feel you got out of it, ie how did it make you a better programmer? Better understanding of what's going on at a low level?
A much better understanding of what the computer is really doing, a much bigger bag of tricks to pull out when faced with a hard problem.
Post SICP, I have no fear of recursive algorithms, or closures, and a healthy understanding of asynchrony. So the kind of JavaScript programming that a lot of people find advanced is very natural to me.
A few months ago I implemented a JS library to parse a certain format using some fancy recursive JS combinators. It's fast, it's innovative, and it will be used on a few top-50 websites pretty soon. Internally, the thing is all about the techniques I learned from SICP -- the intermediate format is basically Scheme in JSON form.
The "interpretation of computer programs" part is nice to know, in my opinion. But the book gives a whirlwind tour of a sizeable chunk of computer science on the way, and the examples are concise to the point of being beautiful. Great book. Used it to learn clojure along the way.
