By Afref Fetter 5 months ago Completed

Prior experience in the field: None.

Like:
Wes Weimer integrated pop-culture references really well with his lectures, making them very informative on non-technological issues as well.

The lecturer's enthusiasm can fill a helium balloon and carry it to space. Loved it!

The class was very engaging and had you hooked till the end.

The assignments required you to put your thinking caps on, and not your "reading" caps like some other courses.

Dislike:
I feel I was unable to obtain a "complete picture" [a parser, lexer, etc. put together], but maybe that's just me.

We didn't really make a web browser, only a superficial one. This was acknowledged by the lecturer.

The code we wrote seemed too constrained by the particular language and library we were using (Python, etc.). The "general" idea [how to implement it] was lost.

Overall:
What is lacking in course content, Westley Weimer makes up for with his excellent teaching abilities. Don't expect to become too proficient at the subject, but definitely worth a try.

By Gerard O'Neill from Weehawken, New Jersey 8 months ago Completed

I took CS262 Programming Languages back in April/May alongside CS212 and CS253. The whole idea behind the course was to gain an understanding of how programming languages are designed, both in theory and practice, by writing components of HTML and JavaScript parsers.

I didn’t really struggle in this class, since it started pretty well into the compilers course that I was taking at Rutgers. Because of that, I had a pretty good understanding of most things that were taught. That’s not to mention the fact that I am fluent in HTML and JavaScript as well. Still, there was some stuff to be learned in this course!

CS262 had a very healthy mix of theory and practice. In my compilers course, most of the class was theory, and then we had three major programming assignments. In CS262, you get to apply pretty much everything you learn right away. I thought this was awesome, especially because I got to apply some things from my compilers course that wasn’t tested in class (e.g. FSM minimization). The course was also taught using PLY (Python Lex-Yacc), which is a Python implementation of Lex and Yacc. Lex and Yacc are very well-known parsing tools used in the creation of programming languages.

Overall, I think CS262 is an awesome course. Westley Weimer is extremely smart, and he made me laugh quite a bit, especially with his drawings. There’s not much else to say about the course, since I really had no issues with it. If you are interested in learning the basics of automata theory and how to build an interpreter or compiler, I highly recommend the course. Also, if you’re taking a similar course in a brick-and-mortar university like I was, this is definitely a great complement!