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Since, you are the instructor for 15-150 this semester and have graduated from CMU as per the slides. I would like to know what you think about similar intro course sequences elsewhere.

Like BrownU's CS019 course using Pyret. It also teaches a functional approach to programming.

Also Berkeley's CS61A,B,C trilogy.

Do intro level courses matter in the long run? Or is it the higher level courses that set apart universities in undergrad CS education?

I'll preface that, since I haven't actually taken any of these courses, I lack the full nuance to be able to make as faithful of a judgement as someone who actually attended these universities.

That being said, I've certainly heard of Berkeley's CS61A, and in particular, Brown's usage of the Pyret language. From what I've gleaned from Brown's curriculum, it looks extremely solid for a one-semester course! Everything from K-means to BST invariants to graphs to DP. One question I would be interested in is how "naturally" the progression arises, as the class goes from topic to topic, as I don't necessarily immediately see the thesis of the course, but that may just be a preference in how I teach. I feel like 15-150 has a very clear and obvious story to how it progresses.

Berkeley's 61A, B, C progression looks solid in terms of how it slowly unravels the state of the world to students. In terms of specifically 61A, I might hesitate a little bit at teaching higher-order functions to first-time programmers in the second week, but again, I don't really have the full context to know how successfully that usually goes. In terms of topics, it looks more object-oriented than either 150 or Brown (in that 150 is not whatsoever, and Brown does not seem to be). Personally, I fear that OOP can lead you to too much focusing on specific machinery (inheritance, `self`, method resolution) as opposed to general programming concepts, like algebraic data, recursion, or compositional thinking. It has its place, but I prefer fundamentals to specific tools.

With respect to your question about intro level courses, personally I believe they're of utmost importance. CMU SCS's success as an educational institution is in absolutely no small part due to the fact that the school's intro courses are _chiefly_ run by undergraduate TAs, and so the undergraduate course sequence is one of the strongest you can find anywhere in the world. In just the first six courses, which earns a CS minor at CMU, a student becomes most formidable. By contrast, 70% of what I learned in upper-level courses at CMU, I do not use at my day job (except for compilers).

Btw, Brandon, I hope you archive your version of the course materials somewhere as they are really as good as the notes, someplaces, even better. All previous versions of 15-150 are basically non-existent.

I'd love to post the lectures recordings online -- that remains to be seen, though, whether that's something the university might permit. Thank you for the kind words, though.

Keep us posted about the lectures. I don't find a personal website of you. Then I would have bookmarked it.

There are so many awesome lectures from other CMU courses like Andy Pavlo's Database, Keenan Crane's Graphics courses.

I so hope CMU records their intro courses and put them out in public.

Ah! Thanks for the detailed reply. It is so good to hear from someone who have passionately benefitted from their undergraduate courses and gets to use knowledge from that in real life.

Btw with 15-150 notes and slides do you have any book suggestion in mind that self learners can read alongside?

Note:- There are some leaked lectures from Brown's CS019, if you want to look, here: https://learnaifromscratch.github.io/software.html#org464eb9...

Book suggestions are always so difficult to recommend. I've been asked this question many times, but honestly, it's hard for me, because I'm really not much of a (text)book learner. I know Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is supposed to be excellent, but honestly books like that just put me to sleep. It's part of the reason why I've put so much effort into my slides.

I'll say that if you want to learn functional programming in particular (in OCaml), the recently released second edition of "Real World OCaml" is an excellent reference. That one might lean more into specific OCaml language constructs than general programming know-how, though.

Otherwise, along with my notes and slides, I think the most important thing to do is just to pick a task and do it. It doesn't need to be something standalone, but I think everyone learning to program should program an expression evaluator, a priority queue, binary search, BFS, tree traversal, what-have-you. I know that the OCaml website also has a list of exercises: https://ocaml.org/problems

Robert Harper also has a book, "Programming in Standard ML", though that one doesn't have exercises, so my slides are meant to cover the same kind of material. It's here anyways, though: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/isml/book.pdf

I hope this helps!

P.S. That Brown schedule looks absolutely intimidating. I'm not sure I could have handled Racket as a first-time programmer. I think it's so important to have a solid conceptual model of what the program is doing before you go into more advanced stuff -- our class only learned higher-order functions today, after 5 weeks of SML!

m3affan 1096 days ago

Thanks for the references!

ggr2342 1096 days ago

Are you talking about the summer 2023 version?

Yes, indeed.