Done with the final! Barely scraped by with an 83%. Areas where I was weak included the polymorphic types question, whether something is tail recursive, and the null function question on imitating the null function in the standard library. I have greatly improved my understanding of ML's struct and signatures (kinda like interfaces) and have gotten some nice practice on writing recursive functions. Overall this was really enjoyable, even if I sucked at the Week 4 homework. I tried to do at least 30 minutes on weekdays and an hour on weekends. So I managed to put in maybe 2 - 4 hours per week on this. Without internet resources I think I would have failed homework for Week 4, though, at this level of effort. I think if I could have devoted more like 6 - 8 hours per week on it very seriously I would have had more success there.
In conclusion, worth it and lots of fun. I'm really glad that a course with grading like this is free!
Pretty fascinating stuff. I haven't had any experience with functional programming languages--I dabbled a little with Lisp but never actually built anything, only did the quizzes off of the German (?) university site that had that spaced repetition style learning quiz tutorial.
HW 1 was enjoyable and still took some effort. HW 2 is a jump in difficulty for me. The cool thing is that I don't think I ever had a good working grasp of how and why to use tail recursion and week 3 is making me confront that.
University of Washington course, Programming Languages Part A. Starts April 2019.
https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages
Apparently will touch on ML, Racket, and Ruby. I think it's a course somewhat similar to the EdX courses that were based on How To Design Programs, 2nd Edition. Alas, those courses on EdX no longer show the majority of the assignments--questions and the grader have been locked behind a paywall. I'm thankful that Coursera still seems to have this one open...