What students have said about Norman Ramsey teaching Programming Languages
The consensus seems to be that the course is a lot of work, but
worth it.
I'm sure we're all surprised.
- This class definitely changed the way I solve problems and made all
the ideas I come up with more elegant.
- The implementation exercises, for all my frustration while doing
them, are tremendously valuable. I find that actually implementing
something like type inference or continuations greatly enhances
my understanding of it, and testable programs are much easier
to play with and build intuition about than are pages of
equations.
- I thoroughly look forward to each class meeting, and am
saddened by the realization at 11:59 that class is over.
It's too bad there's not more than 53 minutes in a [class] hour.
-
Operating Systems and Programming Languages
were the two "highlights" of [most CS majors']
undergraduate career. I enjoyed Programming Languages a lot more
because of the nature of
its assignments: the focus was on elegance and succinct code.
- Learning about the things we learned about was a
complete shift in the way I think about programming, and I've been using
the things I learned... Anyone who does any
programming should take this class.
- My measure of a good problem set is did I learn a lot for the amount of
time I spent. By this measure, the problem sets were fantastic.
- I really enjoyed your class from a
year ago, and I'm applying a suprising number of the principles a
learned in your class on a daily basis at my current job here at
Microsoft.
Why ``surprising''? —NR
- Assignments are challenging and interesting, but unless I start
radically in advance, I have no way of gauging the difficulty of the
assignment.
- I like the text. I
like the super fast response on my questions. I like seeing other
people ask questions, it makes me feel a little less isolated.
- The assignments are usually very interesting, now that we
don't have to mess with tons of annoying C code.
- The assignments are challenging.
- I love the post-problem set documentation (the solution sets,
the grading break-down, and detailed grade distribution).