I think that is true to some extent, but Knuth's approach (which I'm more drawn to) is also theoretically inclined, albeit of a different approach than SICP. Knuth (and myself) see programming as fundamentally being about computers, and Knuth starts with what a computer can do and builds from there. Ableson and Sussman see programming as more about computation, so they start with a model of computation (based on scheme, lambda calculus, etc.). These two approaches are quite different and I don't think you can reconcile them easily. Not that either one is all that much better than the other, though Knuth's is certainly more efficient. It seems to me that a large part of which you favor comes down to how you're wired.
Are program meant to tell the computer what to do? (Knuth)
Or are computers meant to execute our programs? (CISP)
Personally I lean towards the second view, for a simple reason: we design programs much more often than we design computers. Computer design doesn't take much of humanity's time, compared to programming them. So I'd rather have the hardware (and compiler suite) bend over backwards to execute our pretty programs efficiently, than having our programs bend over backwards to exploit our hardware efficiently.
