In reality you get lectures from individuals that became professors because they are great at politics/research but not at teaching (very different skill).

If you even get them and not their 25 year old assistants.

And this is apparently super common even in ivy league universities as Youtube lessons have shown me over and over.

You don't have to imagine, you can look at the code used in the JS version and it goes through some fun contortions to get around the fact that JS is not expression oriented (like Scheme). This is from page 35 (PDF: https://sicp.sourceacademy.org/sicpjs.pdf):

  function count_change(amount) {
    return cc(amount, 5);
  }
  function cc(amount, kinds_of_coins) {
    return amount === 0
           ? 1
           : amount < 0 || kinds_of_coins === 0
           ? 0
           : cc(amount, kinds_of_coins - 1)
             +
             cc(amount - first_denomination(kinds_of_coins),
                kinds_of_coins);
  }
  function first_denomination(kinds_of_coins) {
    return kinds_of_coins === 1 ? 1
           : kinds_of_coins === 2 ? 5
           : kinds_of_coins === 3 ? 10
           : kinds_of_coins === 4 ? 25
           : kinds_of_coins === 5 ? 50
           : 0;

That certainly works, but it's awkward. Here's the Scheme code from the 2nd edition of SICP:

  (define (count-change amount) (cc amount 5))
  (define (cc amount kinds-of-coins)
    (cond ((= amount 0) 1)
          ((or (< amount 0) (= kinds-of-coins 0)) 0)
          (else (+ (cc amount
                       (- kinds-of-coins 1))
                   (cc (- amount
                          (first-denomination
                           kinds-of-coins))
                       kinds-of-coins)))))
  (define (first-denomination kinds-of-coins)
    (cond ((= kinds-of-coins 1) 1)
          ((= kinds-of-coins 2) 5)
          ((= kinds-of-coins 3) 10)
          ((= kinds-of-coins 4) 25)
          ((= kinds-of-coins 5) 50)))