Programming Languages, Part A: Best MOOC Ever?

I took so many MOOCs over the past three years (I lost count but they gotta be around 30), but this one was the hardest in terms of content, homeworks, and quizzes… but also the most fun! It is actually the first part of a conceptually 3-part course, and I am not exaggerating in saying that this is the best MOOC I ever took, because I thoroughly enjoyed every part of it, and I can’t wait to take the other parts.

The following is a relatively quick review of what this course is about (I will use “the course” to refer to part A that I actually took and finished). Each section is either one of the course’s general goals or one of my own observations about it.

Language choice

The instructor Dan Grossman (who is a great teacher, by the way) made it very clear that his language choices depend on the suitability of the language as a vehicle for introducing the programming concepts he wants to teach, and they are:

From what I know about popular languages, I think SML would feel really weird for anyone used to such languages, but not so much for those used to functional languages. I say this because I tried a little bit of Haskell on my own and found those two languages to be similar to each other than any other language I tried, including R, Python, and JavaScript.

Here is an implementation of the popular functions map() and filter() in SML:

fun map (f,xs) =
    case xs of
        []     => []
      | x::xs' => (f x)::map(f,xs');

fun filter (f,xs) =
    case xs of
        []     => []
      | x::xs' => if (f x)
                  then x::filter(f,xs')
                  else filter(f,xs');

Functional programming

This course, and the next one, has a huge focus on concepts that belong to functional programming (FP) or at least close to it. Things like recursion, pattern matching, higher-order functions, and closures take up a huge part of the course and associated homeworks. In between this big concepts, there are small tips about performance, style, and other odds and ends that glue these things together.

I find this paradigm very interesting because I come mainly from the R world, which is a bit of a hybrid between functional and other paradigms that allow mutation. When I learned Python, I found the concept of mutation (especially methods that modify the object in place and return None) kind of annoying. So, I already gravitate toward learning more FP.

Not too theoretical; not too pragmatic

Most programming MOOCs and tutorials out there fall into two categories:

  1. The theoretical kind, like an academic data structures & algorithms course in a computer science degree program. (I never took any of those.)

  2. The practical, “let’s build something” kind (which is obviously taking over the internet).

This course is surprisingly in the middle! It doesn’t let you build something practical like a small app or a game, but it also doesn’t get too heavy with theory and notation. I might say it has just the right amount of either side.

Challenging & rewarding

This is literally stated at the welcome notes of the course, and I wholeheartedly agree! The course material is dense and requires serious focus to understand the concepts if they are new. There are 3 homework assignments. Each contains roughly 10-15 coding problems to solve where the solution could be a one-liner or as long as 15-20 lines. There is also a final exam which is longer (and obviously harder) than your average Coursera “quiz”.

In short, this course will get you to think, and if you are like me, you will definitely enjoy that.

As someone with huge interest in learning programming, I found this course so informative and fun, and I hope this review encourages other programmers to take it. Of course, I am looking forward to starting the second part of the course on Racket. (Oh, Lisp…)

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