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That's interesting. Just a few days ago with great regret I decided to drop the (free) Scala course on Coursera after almost finishing week #3 (of 5 I think). I

That's interesting. Just a few days ago with great regret I decided to drop the (free) Scala course on Coursera after almost finishing week #3 (of 5 I think). I'm actually already pretty familiar at least with the essentials of functional programming but would like to go even deeper. However, I found the step too steep between the easy to understand lectures and the exercises, and the latter not as useful as they could be. It felt like I was suddenly dropped off and left to my own devices with no guidance. "Now implement this!" Uhm... what? Sure, that's easy, I've been implementing much more complicated things for decades. The problem is I have no idea how to approach it "the right way" as far as Scala is concerned, that's why I'm taking the course! Looking at the forum - extremely sparsely populated even after over 4 months - showed that I could also expect no guidance from there. That meant that even when I finished a task I was unable to find out if what I had done was the right (functional) way. For one and most importantly, there is hardly anyone to respond, but also since the only exercises are the homework assignments you can't just post your code, that's an "honor code violation". There also is no "solution", i.e. you can't see how the course author(s) would have implemented it. Another example, people in the forum complained about extreme differences in performance for very minor differences in the way you wrote something, and you had to find all of this out completely for yourself, again no guidance at all. Another point is that I found the problems too academic. Sure, I can walk a list of head.tail or a tree of left.element.right tuples. But overall the problems were all from what I did a long time ago at university and it felt very, very far from what I deal with now - and I don't just do CRUD or other boring stuff and actually do have interesting algorithms to implement. The course feels like being made for university students - in a negative way. Overall I found the course more frustration than it was worth. I could have solved the programming challenges easily enough in a way I already knew, but what's the point? I wanted to learn the new (Scala) way, but felt all alone in trying to do that. The course was like a good violin player demonstrating a piece and then giving me some sheet music and shoving me out the door "come back when you can play that". It's hard to complain about "free", but if course forum participation is a guide, both total numbers as well as the steep drop-off after week 1 and 2, it isn't very successful. The course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/progfun1 https://www.coursera.org/learn/progfun1 Note: Enrolling in the courses individually is possible for free, going through the "specialization" page at https://www.coursera.org/specializations/scala https://www.coursera.org/specializations/scala only shows the for-pay option.

the_af 10y ago
I actually liked the progfun1 course, which I took a few years ago. It's one of the cleanest courses I've taken on Coursera. It's true that it's slightly "academic", but that's what many introductions to functional programming often feel like. However, the follow-up courses, Reactive Programming (retired) and Functional Program Design, are a total let down. They are a rip-off, especially if you paid for them: a complete mess, no relation between lectures and assignments, no introduction of new concepts in relation to a greater context, the slides are not proof-read, constant mentions to non-existent slides and lectures, repeat material from previous courses (a side-effect of the courses being mash-ups of previous material), and example code that doesn't type-check or compile. It's not any single mistake, but the aggregation of them all, and the feeling that the authors just don't care enough. Thankfully I didn't pay for this. In my opinion, the gold standard for Coursera is Dan Grossman's excellent Programming Languages, which I fully recommend.
- davnn 10y ago
  I share the exact same story. Progfun is a really smooth introdu tion to FP in my opinion, no crazy syntax and only the core concepts. For any deeper concepts and if you don't understand what FP really means you should check out a purely functional language.
  - Noseshine 10y ago
    Just to clarify my opinion on progfun: The lectures are good. The coding tasks could have been okay - if there was any guidance. I don't even get to see any sample solutions. So even if I make it work, I don't know if that is a good way to do it, the "functional", the "Scala way". And the performance issue I mentioned, it was a major one, the difference between the code even being usable for more than a thousand elements in the list or getting a stack overflow, and the difference was extremely minor, in one case the order in which you called "union" on sets. All of that had to be found out by the students, and even after they found out nobody really had a good idea or explanation for why it was so. Also, there only was one (small!) opportunity to actually practice what you just learned per week - and that came without any feedback apart from "works/doesn't". Since the course was about a particular programming style that really wasn't enough.

the_af 10y ago

I actually liked the progfun1 course, which I took a few years ago. It's one of the cleanest courses I've taken on Coursera. It's true that it's slightly "academic", but that's what many introductions to functional programming often feel like. However, the follow-up courses, Reactive Programming (retired) and Functional Program Design, are a total let down. They are a rip-off, especially if you paid for them: a complete mess, no relation between lectures and assignments, no introduction of new concepts in relation to a greater context, the slides are not proof-read, constant mentions to non-existent slides and lectures, repeat material from previous courses (a side-effect of the courses being mash-ups of previous material), and example code that doesn't type-check or compile. It's not any single mistake, but the aggregation of them all, and the feeling that the authors just don't care enough. Thankfully I didn't pay for this. In my opinion, the gold standard for Coursera is Dan Grossman's excellent Programming Languages, which I fully recommend.

davnn 10y ago
I share the exact same story. Progfun is a really smooth introdu tion to FP in my opinion, no crazy syntax and only the core concepts. For any deeper concepts and if you don't understand what FP really means you should check out a purely functional language.
- Noseshine 10y ago
  Just to clarify my opinion on progfun: The lectures are good. The coding tasks could have been okay - if there was any guidance. I don't even get to see any sample solutions. So even if I make it work, I don't know if that is a good way to do it, the "functional", the "Scala way". And the performance issue I mentioned, it was a major one, the difference between the code even being usable for more than a thousand elements in the list or getting a stack overflow, and the difference was extremely minor, in one case the order in which you called "union" on sets. All of that had to be found out by the students, and even after they found out nobody really had a good idea or explanation for why it was so. Also, there only was one (small!) opportunity to actually practice what you just learned per week - and that came without any feedback apart from "works/doesn't". Since the course was about a particular programming style that really wasn't enough.