#875 overall
CS51 Functional Programming
Harvard University
1 recommender · 1 thread · recommended in 1 year, 2020 · score 0.7
CS51 is Harvard's functional programming course, taught in OCaml and reached through a CS intro sequence that also includes the systems course CS61. Commenters describe it as demanding, with weekly problem sets and detailed labs that build on the lectures.
Commenters call it an outstanding but terse course that is much harder than its friendly lecture style suggests.
Programming Languagesintermediatevideo lectures#functional programming#ocaml#harvard#problem sets#cs51
Recommendations by year
20062026
1. There’s a companion C book for the course 2. The labs go into much more detail compared to lectures 3. The psets can be Nintendo-hard; you’ll be doing devilish pointer stuff by week 3 or 4.
The happy-go-lucky, flashy tone of the course is completely misleading. It is a challenging course, so much so that it’s been the subject of numerous cheating scandals from students caving under the pressure over the years.
As for depth, this is a first intro to CS meant not only for CS majors but for people from other domains (Econ, humanities, hard sciences, what have you). The style is meant to cater to people who might not be a priori fascinated by flipping bits. Still quite a bit of people decide to concentrate on CS after taking the class, so it must be doing something right in that sense...
The course is not mandatory for CS concentrators, so if you already know your fundamentals you can jump right into CS51 (functional programming) or CS61 (intro to systems), which are outstanding courses but much more terse in style.