So the Programming Languages course is just about over. There’s actually one peer assessment yet to go and it will probably be a few weeks until the course staff tabulates and releases the results, but all of the serious work is over. I wanted to get this post written before I start on two new courses next week. It’s run by Dan Grossman of the University of Washington and ran for 10 weeks. This course used a slightly different schedule than other Coursera courses which usually had weekly sections. For this course, the eight course sections were spread out over the ten weeks so we didn’t have a predictable schedule of when each section would be released.
The course used three different languages, starting with SML for the first four sections, Racket for the next two sections and ending with Ruby for the final two sections. There was a programming assignment for each section, with exception of section 4 when we had a mid-term exam. At the end of it all, we have the final exam which is still ongoing as of the time of writing. There were no other quizzes though each section’s programming assignment had to be submitted twice. Once to the autograding system to test for correctness and once again to the peer assessment system to check for style issues and correctness isssues for which it was difficult to get the autograder to test for. One cool thing is that most of the programming assignments have optional challenge questions which award a small number of bonus points for a comparatively huge amount of extra work, just for those who want to run the extra mile.