So far I'm liking the way the course material is structured. In the first week Martin is guiding you through call-by-name and call-by-value in the lamda calculus, but without its syntactic peculiarities and without really mentioning lamda calculus more than once in passing. I think this is a good idea, because lambda seems to raise defense mechanisms in students who are seeing it for the first time. Sneaky.
Edit: I found a place where the web-based quiz mechanism used by Coursera gave me some troubles. In lecture 1.4 there is an exercise to implement functions and(x,y) and or(x,y) but using neither || nor &&. While I was able to compile and run functions that produce correct truth-tables in my Eclipse environment, the web-based form appears to be fairly tempermental with what it will accept. (Equivalent functions modulo only formatting differences made the difference between "incorrect" and "correct".) I managed to proceed by asking myself whether my function was as simple as possible: no newlines, simplest possible expression, no superfluous characters such as {}
Edit: I found a place where the web-based quiz mechanism used by Coursera gave me some troubles. In lecture 1.4 there is an exercise to implement functions and(x,y) and or(x,y) but using neither || nor &&. While I was able to compile and run functions that produce correct truth-tables in my Eclipse environment, the web-based form appears to be fairly tempermental with what it will accept. (Equivalent functions modulo only formatting differences made the difference between "incorrect" and "correct".) I managed to proceed by asking myself whether my function was as simple as possible: no newlines, simplest possible expression, no superfluous characters such as {}