[jp1390]

The course was designed to give understanding to the basics of programming and show the different types of programming languages with their individual features. Our prof Dr. Farmer, gave special attention to lesser used functional programming language paradigm, with a more specific passion for using OCaml. After taking ENG 1D04, most were used to the comforts of a nice drop-down menu with tons of visual features and easy object-oriented programming, but because of the attention given to OCaml, this was a rude awakening for most. About 90% of the material taught throughout the course was shown using OCaml programming code, which was difficult because the syntax was so different from any of the popular and more commonly used languages, (C, C++, C#, Java, etc).

It seemed as though Dr. Farmer split the course concepts into two main categories: the Functional Programming Paradigm (OCaml) and the Imperative Programming Paradigm (C). Topics included the advantages of using either type of programming paradigm as well as features that are either offered in one or the other or even both, such as lists, tuples, arrays, linked-lists, nodes, etc. A major concept was data structures of inserting/modifying/deleting data within programs, which was carried through both types of programming paradigms.

Mark Breakdown

I-Clicker Quizzes - 20%
Programming Assignments - 20%
Midterm - 20%
Final - 40%

There were ten in-class quizzes, and they were a pain. Lecture was 8:30am and he would have them at the beginning of lecture on Fridays, which sucked! They consisted of five questions which usually had more than one answer and thus caused tons of confusion and argument after he took them up.

There were also six assignments, four of them devoted to OCaml programming, showing a glimpse of how much that man loved that language. They were all about vector storage, i.e. storing 2-D vectors like <2,2> in the Cartesian plane and modifying them or keeping track of the largest magnitude vector, and lots of other stuff like that. They weren't very interesting and in the beginning they were rough because OCaml was hard to grasp at first. The final two assignments were written in C but were under the same guidelines, vector stores. They were a lot easier though because there was a lot more information regarding coding in C rather than OCaml.

The midterm and final were somewhat similar with a bunch of multiple choice questions on basic knowledge of programming concepts with a few small code debugging questions, and the last couple questions were to hand-write programs on paper.

The OCaml textbook was a pdf online and was pretty vague on specific errors and the majority of issues that people had with it. The textbook for C, "C Programming: A Modern Approach", by K. N. King was an absolutely great foolproof reference and I still use it to brush up on stuff now.

All in all, the prof was good but chose the wrong approach for teaching programming principles with useless programming paradigms for the real world. Ohhhh Caml is right!

[Quvol]

The course has changed quite a bit since the original 2008 post above.

As of 2015, this course is essentially an introductory programming course (similar to ENG 1D04) to Java and C++. As you may expect, it covered the basic syntax of each language as well as some more advanced and language-specific features (i.e., operator overloading in C++).

Evaluation
45% Assignments (6)
25% Midterm
30% Final Exam

In general, most of the work you do in the course will be completing the assignments; a lot of people found these to be quite difficult, so try your best not to procrastinate. The midterm and exam were long and fairly tricky, so make sure you get plenty of sleep before each one!

Having prior programming experience in an OO language (such as Java, C#, etc.) is definitely an asset, but does guarantee a good grade in this course.