4 ms·

Can't recommend this course enough. Martin Odersky is a great lecturer and very passionate about functional programming. Learning Scala was a useful bonus too.

by coopdog 14y ago

cdman 14y ago
I had the opposite experience: while the lectures were quite good, the exercises were many times confusing and frustrating - they kept refusing my solution because there were hidden assumptions, not stated clearly in the problem definition.
- pramode 14y ago
  That's strange - I did not have any difficulty with the exercises and found them to be clearly specified! All the exercise problems were neatly broken down into small functions - you simply had to fill up the body of the functions!
  - bazzargh 14y ago
    The exercises were not all that difficult (especially given that there were unit tests for almost all of them), but they did have issues. Some of the tests required you to use functions that didn't appear until one or two lectures later. Most likely the GP is complaining about the fact that the server-side tests were on bigger datasets than the ones that shipped with the code; but that wasn't a big issue as you could keep resubmitting up to the deadline. I found it useful to remember that almost all of the solution functions were very short; most were one line, some up to five; if you were writing long functions you're most likely doing it wrong. Similarly, the local tests should finish almost instantaneously. If they take 30s with the local dataset, they'll time out with the larger dataset on the server.
- bad_user 14y ago
  From my experience with the first iteration of this course and with the problems experienced by people on the course forum ... 99.99% of problems came from NOT reading the assignment. I went through all the homework and passed the course with the maximum grade. Except for the last homework where I too was guilty of the above, all submissions took the maximum grade from the first try. I don't remember encountering any confusing problem definition and even if a problem is confusing to you, there were plenty of people available on the forum and all you had to do was to ask for clarifications. Also, in regards to solutions, there were really helpful advices in the assignments' source-code. Sometimes all you had to do was to translate English to Scala.
Petefine 14y ago
Agreed. This course (my first into to functional programming) makes it hard to go back to working in Java. Things that can take a lot of code, such as grouping, filtering and aggregating data, can usually be achieved very naturally and concisely in Scala.
- kyllo 14y ago
  Oh, Java is just excruciating to use after learning functional programming. On the other hand, I don't know if you use Javascript much, but you'll see it in a very different (much better) light after taking a FP course.
teacr 14y ago
Odersky is a truly brilliant language designer. However, he tends to talk slooooowly and methodically (him being German/Swiss is probably related), which makes watching his videos kind of unfun, and there are no slides. There's an hour of lectures, and I'm pretty sure I could say the same stuff in a 10 minute video at most. I mean, this kind of way of teaching is really ancient and outdated; why would you subject yourself to 7 weeks of watching boring videos, when you could just read his whole book RIGHT NOW in 1-2 days, and then read other books, tutorials on websites, etc.?
- microtherion 14y ago
  Yes, I found the class somewhat slow going, and the programming environment fairly unpleasant (I’m not used to working in Eclipse). I ended up dropping the class somewhere in the middle. Generally, I learn better from books than from lectures, but I found that some of the lecturers in online courses are truly outstanding (Prof Agarwal in Circuits and Electronics at MITx, Profs Ng (Stanford, Machine Learning), Egerstedt (Georgia Tech, Control of Mobile Robots), Pattison (Berklee, Songwriting)), so listening to their lectures was worth it. I did not quite find Odersky as strong as a lecturer.
  - sampo 14y ago
    You can edit the source files with any text editor, and compile, test and submit using `sbt` from the command line. No need to use Eclipse.
    - recursive 14y ago
      The lectures really only showed how to accomplish it with eclipse.
- sampo 14y ago
  > he tends to talk slooooowly `mplayer -af scaletempo` and then pressing ] to increase the speed of the video, without altering the pitch of the sound, was my solution. (And I hear also the Coursera player lets you to change the video speed.)

Can't recommend this course enough. Martin Odersky is a great lecturer and very passionate about functional programming. Learning Scala was a useful bonus too.

by coopdog 14y ago

Can't recommend this course enough. Martin Odersky is a great lecturer and very passionate about functional programming. Learning Scala was a useful bonus too.

cdman 14y ago

I had the opposite experience: while the lectures were quite good, the exercises were many times confusing and frustrating - they kept refusing my solution because there were hidden assumptions, not stated clearly in the problem definition.

pramode 14y ago
That's strange - I did not have any difficulty with the exercises and found them to be clearly specified! All the exercise problems were neatly broken down into small functions - you simply had to fill up the body of the functions!
- bazzargh 14y ago
  The exercises were not all that difficult (especially given that there were unit tests for almost all of them), but they did have issues. Some of the tests required you to use functions that didn't appear until one or two lectures later. Most likely the GP is complaining about the fact that the server-side tests were on bigger datasets than the ones that shipped with the code; but that wasn't a big issue as you could keep resubmitting up to the deadline. I found it useful to remember that almost all of the solution functions were very short; most were one line, some up to five; if you were writing long functions you're most likely doing it wrong. Similarly, the local tests should finish almost instantaneously. If they take 30s with the local dataset, they'll time out with the larger dataset on the server.
bad_user 14y ago
From my experience with the first iteration of this course and with the problems experienced by people on the course forum ... 99.99% of problems came from NOT reading the assignment. I went through all the homework and passed the course with the maximum grade. Except for the last homework where I too was guilty of the above, all submissions took the maximum grade from the first try. I don't remember encountering any confusing problem definition and even if a problem is confusing to you, there were plenty of people available on the forum and all you had to do was to ask for clarifications. Also, in regards to solutions, there were really helpful advices in the assignments' source-code. Sometimes all you had to do was to translate English to Scala.

Petefine 14y ago

Agreed. This course (my first into to functional programming) makes it hard to go back to working in Java. Things that can take a lot of code, such as grouping, filtering and aggregating data, can usually be achieved very naturally and concisely in Scala.

kyllo 14y ago
Oh, Java is just excruciating to use after learning functional programming. On the other hand, I don't know if you use Javascript much, but you'll see it in a very different (much better) light after taking a FP course.

teacr 14y ago

Odersky is a truly brilliant language designer. However, he tends to talk slooooowly and methodically (him being German/Swiss is probably related), which makes watching his videos kind of unfun, and there are no slides. There's an hour of lectures, and I'm pretty sure I could say the same stuff in a 10 minute video at most. I mean, this kind of way of teaching is really ancient and outdated; why would you subject yourself to 7 weeks of watching boring videos, when you could just read his whole book RIGHT NOW in 1-2 days, and then read other books, tutorials on websites, etc.?

microtherion 14y ago
Yes, I found the class somewhat slow going, and the programming environment fairly unpleasant (I’m not used to working in Eclipse). I ended up dropping the class somewhere in the middle. Generally, I learn better from books than from lectures, but I found that some of the lecturers in online courses are truly outstanding (Prof Agarwal in Circuits and Electronics at MITx, Profs Ng (Stanford, Machine Learning), Egerstedt (Georgia Tech, Control of Mobile Robots), Pattison (Berklee, Songwriting)), so listening to their lectures was worth it. I did not quite find Odersky as strong as a lecturer.
- sampo 14y ago
  You can edit the source files with any text editor, and compile, test and submit using `sbt` from the command line. No need to use Eclipse.
  - recursive 14y ago
    The lectures really only showed how to accomplish it with eclipse.
sampo 14y ago
> he tends to talk slooooowly `mplayer -af scaletempo` and then pressing ] to increase the speed of the video, without altering the pitch of the sound, was my solution. (And I hear also the Coursera player lets you to change the video speed.)