#605 overall
CS 3240 Advanced Programming Techniques
Cornell University
1 recommender · 1 thread · recommended in 1 year, 2009 · score 1.0
CS 3240 is a Cornell upper-level programming course covering advanced programming techniques, with commenters noting a focus on lexers, parsers, and interpreters. Commenters say its content changed after the original instructor, Olin, left.
One commenter calls it by far the most interesting and educational course they took as an undergrad, citing its strong coverage of lexers, parsers, and interpreters when Olin taught it.
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To be fair, when 2130 (along with the ECE2030 requirement) was cut they replaced it with 2110 and 3240. As I understand it (I tested for standing, so I can't claim first-hand knowledge), 2110 does a very good job of combining the relevant parts of ECE2030 and the C bits of CS2130. That, to me, makes it a solid replacement for those concepts.
The first time 3240 was taught, Olin was the professor teaching it. It covered a fair chunk of the material you'd expect to see in CS4510 that semester while also being an excellent class on lexers, parsers, and interpreters (not so much on compilers, but of course it's not a compilers course). I can comfortably say that it was by far the most interesting and educational course I took during my undergrad career. Since Olin's unfortunate departure, 3240 has apparently turned into just another lexer and parser course.
On the whole I'd say the changes they made w.r.t. CS2130 were good. However...
Threads has made it so that you can get a CS degree without taking an algorithms or data structures course above the 1000 level, which I find wholly disappointing. It's not that the degrees these students are walking away with aren't perfectly valid things to have degrees in, but I have a hard time calling a lot of these undergrads "computer scientists".
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