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.

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 :=)

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.

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.

I wanted to learn more about Functional Programming and prepare for a course on Compiler Construction. This course showed how statements and expressions differ. Also using a pure functional programming language is really good to prepare for my daily work and developing a compiler.

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).

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.

Very useful, but I cannot submit my assignment and ML is also not available for my computer

the course material was good and fun! but the discussion forum was not so active.

Clear content and good exercises, which need an investment of time and thinking.

Solid introduction to functional programming and programming languages concepts.

The peer review was too time consuming. Otherwise great course

A challenging course with some deep insight into programming.

Good intro. to Functional Programming

Muy buena información; nivel alto.

it's very useful, thanks

Quite interesting~

so cool

good

Easy

Dangerous combination of dry presentation of abstract concepts, and demonstration rather than explanation. The class left me with lots of open questions, most beginning with "why", many followed by "would you", and may not be well suited for an online environment without teacher interaction.

I get the impression you have to really like math, rather than computers and programming, to find this class interesting.

The horrid sound quality from the terrible microphone the teacher used doesn't help make the lessons more enjoyable. Or maybe that's coursera's compression, I'm not sure as I haven't taken many classes here yet.

PS: Something about this comment form is buggy, making proper formatting of my review impossible.

This series of courses Part A-C looks amazing BUT using SML/NJ is critical to Part A. On a MAC running Catalina SML will not run, maybe because it utilises 32bit routines which cannot run on Catalina. I found an online version of standard ML but it isn't suited to doing the homeworks.

Not very applicable for the real world. Recursion over lists can be a nice mind exercise but please don't use it in real world, there are way too many stack overflows, unneeded context switches and cryptic code already, don't add to it.

a little boring. I spent lots of time on learning on an useless language rather than learning the spirit of functional programming. I suppose to use C/C++\python or other normal programming language as the lesson language.