Excellent course! I appreciate that the professor is very precise and intentional in his explanations and use of terminology.

Update: after finishing Part C, I can definitely say this is a high quality course all the way through. Dan Grossman is a fantastic instructor, and most of the homework assignments (especially the challenge problems) were interesting, difficult, and rewarding. It's a thorough course that gives you everything you need to succeed at some genuinely complex stuff.

The only qualm I had came right at the beginning of Part A. The initial software setup was a pain on MacOS. I think the course's setup instructions weren't completely up to date with regard to some unexpected quirks between the then-current software versions and with my OS version, so I had to do some serious troubleshooting to get things up and running. It was worth it, though!

This course is fun. I recommend it. I had a great time learning about many topics I was somewhat familiar but never had the chance to study them deeply. I was introduced to a new programming language, which l learned to respect and enjoy. After finishing the course I feel confident about what functional programming is and also about many other aspects programming languages have. I definitely will take part B and C of the course. Thanks a lot for providing this course!

I would like to politely and respectfully suggest as an improvement for the next version of this course the usage of examples more connected to the real world instead of those purely didactical. It is not a big deal, the examples used in the course work fine to grasp the announced idea, but the knowledge would consolidate more firmly this other way.

Loved it! This material focus on the Standard ML language (which you probably won't use for any practical purpose later) but is a very good foundation to understand other languages in the ML family, like F# and it has influenced Haskel and Elm (check the Wiki for "ML (programming language)").

I looked at the documentation for F# and what before would be a black-box was mostly clear (specially pattern-matching, that may have looked confusing when reading F# docs).

I am a self-taught web developer, don't have any regular background on computer science and have been working in the field for almost 5 years. This was my first interaction with a functional language and the time spent was totally worth it.

Thanks a lot, Dan! Prior to this course, I've been using Python for some casual projects for a few years, but some concepts like first-class functions and lambda expressions, etc, always seem daunting to me and I never got the hang of that. With the help of this course, my understanding of a lot of concepts in Python really improved a lot. In addition, I find learning Javascript becomes much easier after understanding SML. To sum up, I really learned a lot from this lesson, I like your teaching style (especially Live Coding :)) and I surely would sign up for the rest of the course.

A fascinating and brilliantly put together course, but highly demanding.

A little more guidance on some of the challenging homework would have been welcomed, but in terms of the lecture quality, course structure, and materials provided, this is a superb introduction to Functional Programming and a great theoretical guide to programming meta-concepts in general.

Recommended both for prospective future developers and experienced seasoned developers, especially if your background thus far is primarily in imperative/OO languages like Python, Java, and C/C++ etc. You will learn a lot!

The course was quite time intensive (it took me about 54 hours), but it was absolutely worth it!

I am quite experienced in object-oriented programming with Java, but I had no clue about functional programming. This has changed! I have learned some foundational concepts and idioms that will help me in other languages as well. For example, in newer Java versions there are many features that allow functional-style programming. Now I have a good foundation to pick them up quickly and use them properly.

I'm looking forward to part B!

Phenomally empathetic, considerate, useful, and entertaining course. The model of how to explain things to people without either wasting any of their time or omitting any crucial context. Far better than the in-person first-year units of the Curtin University CS degree (Australia) I attended in 2019. I hope this is open-sourced and remains available to all future generations of people. It's an incredibly valuable resource for human society. Thanks to everyone involved for their labour spent on this.

Challenging course. It may be a good idea to have some prior practice with the ideas (especially lexical scope, higher-order functions, and recursion). However, the instructor's enthusiasm makes it worth it in any case. For me, it hit the spot, since it built up some things I had practiced from before, yet taught me some new things (especially being an introduction to static typing and type inference). I'm definitely looking forward to parts B and C!

Great course for getting into the fundamentals of programming languages. Bit of a steep curve between Sections 1 and 2, but nothing impossible as long as you go over the material well. My prior programming experience in Python meant I had to work a bit in the first homework to break out of that mould of thinking. But that was good as it did help me find more elegant solutions to even projects I was doing in Python.

Great instructor, nice content, precise definitions, challenging (in a good way) homeworks... Are these enough to take an online course without certificate and commit 15-20 hours on average per week? I think for most of the people the answer is YES.

Warning: This course is not for beginners but if you see yourself on at least close to intermediate level don't worry; you will do fine.

It is awesome. It really taught me to see things slightly differently, especially static vs dynamically typed programming languages. I also learned about theory behind them. It also helped me to clear some misconceptions. Implementing a mini programming language is the fun part. Go for it! I'm gonna study Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs for more stuffs like this.

Excellent course and teacher. I love that all of it was 100% accessible for free, and that it was both fun and challenging, yet very doable for most people who do their work and had prior experience.

Dan Grossman is a wonderful instructor. He conveys the ideas in the course fluently. I wish he give more courses about other topics in computer science

A must-do course for all programmers.

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.

This class is a pain in the arse and really hard if you don't have the required background. The language is NOT as easy as Java or C or Python.

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.

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.

I have problem keeping up wit the course because not only I have experienced regular Internet issue but also I Have difficulty configuring the SML to work properly.

In truth the course is rated five stars.

Dan Grossman and his team appear to be excellent educators. This is very much reflected on the quality of the content available in this course. Due to the fast-pace nature of the material I am considering taking an extra week to review some of the contents before moving on to the next chapter of the series. My final impression is, having very basic previous programming experience, that the enormous ammount of information delivered might feel a bit overwhelming and intimidating.

Thanks to all the people that make this available for the world to join. Looking forward to keep on learning.

All three parts are amazing. Dan is a great computer scientists and a teacher. He have very clear way of explaining ideas. Material covered in courses is highly relevant. Concepts covered in functional parts can be seen in many "fresh" languages (Scala, Swift, Nim). Deeper grasp of OOP and its relation to functional programming helps understand core differences and similarities.

I cant recommend this three part course enough for anyone who don't just want to know one programming language, but to be a better computer engineer.

This is an essential lesson to start learning programming language concepts. Dan Grossman has created a great learning path. All the videos are of high quality explaining in detail concepts that each developer should be aware of. The material given was nicely organized with a lot of examples. I cannot recommend this course more highly!

PS: The course uses SML, a functional language. If it's your first time working with that paradigm do not hesitate. SML is quite simple and it will open a new world for you!

This course is really eye-opening! I find many answers to my questions during my exploration about functional programming language. The presentation is very clear, each piece of information over the course is well-connected with other parts. This course presents programming language as an intriguing subject/topic. A slightly more practical benefit is that this course makes one a better programmer, regardless of the choice of programming language. I definitely hope to see more courses like this.

a great experience! i was surprised how engaging the course was!

never having heard about the language used or intended to learn it, it is true what dan had said from the beginning: it does lend itself beautifully to learn fundamental concepts of programming and it certainly gave me a deeper understanding of programming languages in general.

i can highly recommend this course to anyone who wants to become more agile, literate and confident programming in whatever language you are using.

Really excellent course which teaches the underlying concepts of functional PL. Prog. Grossman is passionate as well as expert in the topic, and the course is very well organized and inspiring. I recommend it highly, especially for experienced OOP programmers who want to know what the "big deal is about" FP. Also, the ML skills I acquired during the course will be transferable, as well as useful to read research papers and books using it, e.g. Okinawa's Functional Data Structures.