This was a fantastic course, and I do hope they follow it up with an advanced one. I especially enjoyed how one submitted homework attempts with sbt, and how their unit tests encouraged one to repeatedly submit until a perfect score was obtained. I feel that I learned a lot.
I get the impression that this course lowered the threshold to exploring the functional paradigm for a lot of students who were aware of it but never took the time to do it on their own. Ten thousand new programmers in one language is no small achievement.
Who here wouldn't jump at the chance to join a MOOC on Haskell taught by Simpon Peyton Jones? Or Rich Hickey teaching Clojure?
I hope to see more learning resources like this in the future.
I'm in the middle of taking the course, and while I enjoy it, I wish the prerequisites mentioned the heavy emphasis on math. I don't have a CS degree, nor do I have a background in advanced maths, so I find myself struggling with the assignments and in-class exercises.
I'm a little confused by your comment, but as someone with an advanced math degree I might just not have noticed what you're referring to. Can you point out what in the course you felt involved a heavy emphasis on math?
The very set of exercises had me working on Pascal's Triangle and binomial co-efficients. The exercises continued to work through math problems. While I'm sure this stuff is old hat for many programmers, I often struggled with the basic algorithms in the problems.
I realize many of these are "basic" problems for CS folks, but I don't have any CS training and never took a math course higher than high school pre-calculus (many moons ago), and learned programming on the job. I'm not criticizing the course, either--I am managing to pick up the language, but I just wanted to note both my struggles with the course, and the tacit prerequisite of a reasonable background in math.
hey bmj, you say you're taking the course now? My understanding is that this course is over - do you mean all the material is still available, including the corrections/grading and certificate-awarding system even though Odersky & team are no longer working on it behind the scenes?
Yep, all material is still available, but I don't believe you can submit your work for a certificate. I just wanted a structured way to learn Scala, so I wasn't interested in receiving a certificate for my work.
I'm 100% sure one cannot get a certificate. It's not clear whether one can submit homework via sbt to the automated test suites on the server. Have you tried that as an experiment?
I get the impression that this course lowered the threshold to exploring the functional paradigm for a lot of students who were aware of it but never took the time to do it on their own. Ten thousand new programmers in one language is no small achievement.
Who here wouldn't jump at the chance to join a MOOC on Haskell taught by Simpon Peyton Jones? Or Rich Hickey teaching Clojure?
I hope to see more learning resources like this in the future.