Around 2000 I took an AI course at the University of Guelph. I don’t think I learned too much. We didn’t talk about neural networks, as far as I can remember. My end of term project was, I think, a pathfinding algorithm wearing an AI costume. There were certainly no discussions of transformers. No CUDA. No PyTorch. None of that existed.
But what I remember doing a lot of was coding in Lisp - a lot of Lisp in the dark University of Guelph CIS lab.
As a scientist who has ended up gradually becoming more of a programmer, I battled through the SICP after seeing the cult following it has. It’s a weird, but good book, and I couldn’t imagine a book like that using anything other than Lisp