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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Functional Programming in Scala Capstone by École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

4.4
stars
542 ratings

About the Course

In the final capstone project you will apply the skills you learned by building a large data-intensive application using real-world data. You will implement a complete application processing several gigabytes of data. This application will show interactive visualizations of the evolution of temperatures over time all over the world. The development of such an application will involve: — transforming data provided by weather stations into meaningful information like, for instance, the average temperature of each point of the globe over the last ten years ; — then, making images from this information by using spatial and linear interpolation techniques ; — finally, implementing how the user interface will react to users’ actions....

Top reviews

MP

Sep 7, 2019

The capstone project has done a fantastic job of drilling in some of the important fundamentals taught in the rest of the courses. It is definitely worth taking if you've done the rest of the courses.

KB

Jun 13, 2017

Good course, some of the assignments could have been more explicit with expectations in cases where specific implementation details matter but the forums were helpful in that regard anyways.

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76 - 93 of 93 Reviews for Functional Programming in Scala Capstone

By Fleur K

Nov 25, 2017

The first couple of assignments I found harder than the rest, and also the best bits. I found myself enthusiastically telling my colleagues about the data files and the spark code to join them. After that it got a bit too simple perhaps. And a little contrived. Some of the curried functions you had to fill in were way different from what I'd have written if I'd been staring at an empty screen and even after the course I've still not learned why I'd want to use this setup. The Signal bit in the last assignment was just plain silly, I think. It remains completely unclear why you'd want to use Signals here, other than that you want to refer to materials from the reactive programming course, and the sample code for the update doesn't actually work because the update method is protected.

By Роман В

Jun 24, 2018

Milestones 1-3 was OK but milestone 4 require a much more efficient solution. And the only info grader gives you is the message about timeout. It would be better if requirements for milestones 1-3 were harder to fullfill or milestone 4 would not depend on previous code. But it depends and if your solution is inefficient it's very painful to search the problem all around the code. It's offered to use spark and other tools in this project but using spark is also painful. I get inconsistent result from grader with occasional OutOfMemory exceptions, but this project cries to be implemented with spark. I've learned something during this course but it was too stressfull and painful.

By Anton

Dec 28, 2023

You will learn a lot of geodesy and some interesting numerical mathematics, but no so much Scala. As far as I understand Spark has no official support for Scala3, only through workarounds that do not support everything (I have spent quite some time trying to make Spark work the way I wanted, but I have failed). If a test fails, the logs are basically useless. Generally, this course looks as unpolished as other courses in the specialization, reflecting limited resource available and invested. The Capstone is particularly frustrating, since you will not learn any new programming concepts here.

By Patrik I

Jun 6, 2020

I'm sad to say that the last course in the specialization was the worst. The grader functions made it quite cumbersome to use Spark, which the test of the specialization was about.

You cannot use Spark throughout the course, because of the grader functions. You have to jump in and out of the Spark domain, which hurts performance and will not allow you to write a complete Spark program.

By Iurii S

Nov 19, 2017

Would have liked more tests provided with the capstone to supplement often vague specifications. Feedback from autograder is often obscure as well as it refers to some input parameters of the randomized test - hard to take guidance in code improvement from it.

By David P

Jun 16, 2017

Tough to design a capstone for a course, but I was never really able to get excited about the capstone project. It felt tedious. Not sure if this is the course organizers fault thought...

By Jędrzej B

May 22, 2020

More about number crunching than fp. The dataset is within the jar, which caused a lot of problems and excluded efficient solutions (and the course is about efficiency as well).

By Erickzon M T C

Oct 27, 2021

Creo que los ejercicios y trabajos deberian ser mas de aplicacion que de algoritmia ya que no permite analizar más los métodos que usaras en vez del algoritmo.

By Kyle L

Jul 21, 2017

I have finished previous 4 courses, they are excellent. But this one not easy to understand, doesn't have some simple test cases.

By Partha

Mar 20, 2018

Lots of ambiguity in the course assignment, especially the 5th week one. Also response from teaching staff is very poor.

By joshua

Jul 17, 2017

Overall I liked the course but some of the grading output was hard to understand what exactly I was getting wrong.

By Anton

May 25, 2017

It was too algorithmically and math heavy. Also, it would have been good to have more videos.

By Canh S L

Apr 21, 2017

Good project but instruction is a bit draft. Probably because I joined their first ever one.

By Ciprian L

Jan 19, 2018

too much UI

By Kirpicheva T A

Mar 27, 2024

No good explanations, no mentors, everyone survives on their own. For the life of me I cannot pass farther than week 4. Sometimes instructions even make it worse, so you are left to experiment and try to understand, that you do not need to listen. For example, there was 1 time when they showed alpha = 0, thats it, so I assumed that I need to leave it be. But it turned out that that would make all colors transparent and grader whould signal wrong coloring. Yes, I could have guessed, but it was not obvious. The grader timeouts and there is no optimization I come up with for me to pass this course. Such a pity as this is a great way to test your skills, but there is no guidance on how to improve them.

By Will D

Jul 16, 2019

I appreciate how hard it can be to write coding assignments. Especially in this case it seems as though the limitations stipulated by Coursera may have been quite restrictive for a big data spark project. However, I was really disappointed with this course. Rather than getting to test out my scala/spark skills I found myself trying to shoehorn functions into the methods provided by the grader only to have them fail unexpectedly with little feedback. Some more pointers on how to setup appropriate unit tests would also have been quite helpful. It seemed not so straight forward for spark.

By Nils-Helge G H

Jul 13, 2017

There were too much ambiguity in the assignments. The structure and definition of the assignments made it unclear and difficult to solve with some of the included frameworks. It would be a lot better having a stricter definition and limit it to one or two frameworks that were suitable for the specific definition of the assignments.

By Adriaan T

Apr 12, 2017

For a course that requires you to work on your own project, it still forces you to follow a code skeleton outline. This limits the freedom with which to tackle the project's issue. There is not much guidance or support from course organizers, which makes this course not very educative.