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Back to Programming Languages, Part A

Learner Reviews & Feedback for Programming Languages, Part A by University of Washington

4.9
stars
1,876 ratings

About the Course

This course is an introduction to the basic concepts of programming languages, with a strong emphasis on functional programming. The course uses the languages ML, Racket, and Ruby as vehicles for teaching the concepts, but the real intent is to teach enough about how any language “fits together” to make you more effective programming in any language -- and in learning new ones. This course is neither particularly theoretical nor just about programming specifics -- it will give you a framework for understanding how to use language constructs effectively and how to design correct and elegant programs. By using different languages, you will learn to think more deeply than in terms of the particular syntax of one language. The emphasis on functional programming is essential for learning how to write robust, reusable, composable, and elegant programs. Indeed, many of the most important ideas in modern languages have their roots in functional programming. Get ready to learn a fresh and beautiful way to look at software and how to have fun building it. The course assumes some prior experience with programming, as described in more detail in the first module. The course is divided into three Coursera courses: Part A, Part B, and Part C. As explained in more detail in the first module of Part A, the overall course is a substantial amount of challenging material, so the three-part format provides two intermediate milestones and opportunities for a pause before continuing. The three parts are designed to be completed in order and set up to motivate you to continue through to the end of Part C. The three parts are not quite equal in length: Part A is almost as substantial as Part B and Part C combined. Week 1 of Part A has a more detailed list of topics for all three parts of the course, but it is expected that most course participants will not (yet!) know what all these topics mean....

Top reviews

JF

Mar 14, 2023

Excellent course and teacher. I love that all of it was 100% accessible for free, and that it was both fun and challenging, yet very doable for most people who do their work and had prior experience.

YZ

Dec 2, 2016

I'm just a beginner for CS or SE classes, and find this course really concise and challenging. It opens a door for me to get deeper into programming language. No wonder it got so high average score.

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By ttttttttttttttttttttttt<>"

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Apr 9, 2018

Amazing

By 刘洋

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May 9, 2017

编程神课！！！

By gagandeep s

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Nov 14, 2021

awesum

By Mohammed S

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Sep 29, 2020

thanks

By Tacinight

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May 25, 2018

Great!

By 徐承恩

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Dec 22, 2017

G

r

e

a

t!

By yashwanth y

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Oct 24, 2024

great

By liruidong

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Mar 17, 2018

great

By 肖守冬

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May 7, 2017

great

By MAMILLA R S V K B

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Feb 12, 2024

Good

By MANJIT K

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Jul 2, 2022

Nice

By tran h

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Jun 8, 2022

good

By Nguyen D V

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Jun 6, 2022

good

By 陈放

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Jun 22, 2019

好的不行

By Mike

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Mar 26, 2019

Good

By Hugsy W

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Oct 23, 2017

good

By Darek J

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Sep 13, 2023

:)

By Héctor B A

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Sep 1, 2016

Great course overall. It focuses on functional programming concepts like immutability, locally-defined functions, pattern-matching and forces the user to use recursion, taking you out of your for-loop comfort zone. In my humble opinion, maybe the time spent in learning the SML language, which is not the main goal of the course, takes a bit too long, but on the other hand I guess that can't really be helped. Videos are grate and grading procedures are pretty fair. Mind you, the course is fairly time-consuming.

By Lorenzo B

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Jun 13, 2020

Four stars because for me at least one of the most interesting parts about the course it the comparisons that happen LATER in part B and C, between oop/fp and especially static/dynamic typing; that is, I treat this course as a test to see if you're interested in the whole thing (I am). Otherwise a solid 5/5. Also I personally found that polyml often gives clearer diagnostics than sml/nj, but your mileage may vary here. AND it's my first course here :=)

By Scott v K

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Jan 8, 2017

The constructs of learning functional programming are very useful and well explained. This course is about theory with practice problems which are somewhat challenging using SML as the programming language. The only downside of the course is the use of SML, which is fine for educational purposes, but lacks any real development / debugging frameworks and has no commercial usability beyond learning the concepts in the course.

By Matthew G

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Feb 15, 2021

The content of this course is very good and easy to follow. It's not a very difficult course. All homeworks can easily be completed by watching the video content. The video presentations do have some sound issues that may make them annoying to watch. The sound issues are present in all videos and take this course in my opinion from a perfect score to a 4/5.

By Jeffrey C

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Jan 4, 2022

Fun course at times and overall very intense. Some of the homework questions later in the course were extremely difficult and required a lot more time than designated (and a lot more time than I would prefer to give).

By Thomas R

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Feb 3, 2024

I wasn't comfortable the whole course I honestly did not have a clue what to look for I guess I'll screwed this one up. I still believe the teaching was very good and I would like THANK everyone involved.

By Messias T

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Jan 11, 2021

Gostei bastante do curso, entretanto, algumas partes dos homeworks ficaram mal explicadas, além da falta de mais casos de testes para corroborar o que se pedia nas questões.