Oh boy! Now that I've completed the infamous 35L, I legit feel like I am ready to tackle ANYTHING. This course is ABSOLUTELY broken, and no other will probably ever top this one. My man Eggert made ANOTHER new assignment this quarter (aside from the insanely impossible Assignment 9), and the workload became even harder than ever before.
I am glad that I took this during S20 -- probably the wisest decision I've ever made so far. The grading was much quicker than any of the previous quarters, and the final was MUCH simpler. The average is around 70%, which is honestly unprecedented in an Eggert course.
I somehow ended up with a raw score of 94% total, but that still wasn't enough to get an A+ in the class. Guess that was just never an option to begin with... :(
I will recommend my TA Ritam, since he was completely reasonable with the Assignment 10 grading, and his lectures are very informative. However, sometimes it will be useful to use slides from other labs as well -- since each TA makes their own, and the information often differs quite a bit.

Lastly, quote the TA Daniel:
"The almighty egg"

This class sucks, plain and simple. Programming paradigms are actually something I have some genuine appreciation for, and I can understand Eggert's passion for how good programming language design choices affect project design. It's intuitive and interesting to me. But every aspect of this class is painful and stressful, almost as if by design. It is essentially 2 classes at once: one where you try 30-40 hours a week to keep up with Eggert's project specs and cobble together a working set of code each week, where the TAs (no fault on their part) are sometimes just as confused as you are. I wouldn't wish Project 2 on my worst enemy. The other is an actual programming language course, where the lectures are relatively hit-or-miss as far as how engaging and relevant they are to the course material. Did I mention that every page of the 500-page textbook is fair game for the exams?

The number of all-nighters I had to pull, the amount of time I had to take from other classes just to get the grade I did, the toll on my mental health, not worth it. Never again.

The class itself was pretty useful because we are exposed to different types of programming languages that are not just the usual imperative languages. The homeworks however are pretty difficult, especially the scheme and 2nd Ocaml ones. However, I enjoyed the Prolog assignment and the python project. Professor Eggert is extremely nice and I highly recommend going to his office hours for clarifications and extra help of concepts covered in class. I took CS111 with him as well and for me CS111 was definitely a lot easier than CS131. I recommend him for CS111 as he is really knowledgeable about the material and I learned a lot from that class. However, he is basically the only one that teaches 131 so you really have no choice for who to take it with this class. Good luck!

This class sucked p bad. Not really sure what I gained from this class. Partially to my own fault due to not trying as hard as I could have, but also the level of difficulty for each assignment was kind of ridiculous. I'd go to Lab and feel like I learned something, yet I'd start an assignment and often times have literally 0 clue how to do what I wanted to do. It felt like I got exposed to many topics, yet learned almost nothing. Completely unrelated topics each week definitely didn't help. It was a bad time. Just get it over with

note: class taken remotely during covid-19.
tl;dr his lectures are intense but pretty great, projects take a LONG LONG time, exams are nearly impossible, but VERY GENEROUS CURVE.

workload for this class is incredibly heavy even when I didn't do any of the readings assigned for this class. the projects simply are incredibly difficult and I wouldn't recommend you wasting too much time to figure them out yourselves. Definitely try it yourself first for 2-3 hrs, and then please do yourself a favor to reference github when you can't figure it out. otherwise, you will NOT have time for your other classes and will very likely not figure it out at all. don't feel bad about it because almost everyone i knew referenced github at some point. just make sure you understand the code from github 100% then you'll be fine for the assessments and will learn the material. hardest project was 2nd ocaml project and the scheme project, so brace yourself!

definitely attend TAs discussion because they will 130% help you and give you hints for doing the projects! s/o to kimmo who was an amazing TA this quarter :) honestly all the TAs were pretty great too.

his lectures are one of the best at ucla cs and i definitely learned a lot about programming languages from his lectures. these are concepts I can apply to even languages we didn't cover in class, and will definitely help me in my cs career in the future. So, definitely take eggert if you want to learn a lot.

personally, i ended up fine by not doing the readings, but if you have time, please do because you will be able to learn even more. don't worry too much about your performance in the midterm/final. I was around the top 30% and still managed to get a solid A. but maybe it was just because eggert was being nice because of covid and the protests that were going on.

this class will be rough, but if you actually understand the projects and attend lecture, you will do just fine !!

Like every other review on here, this class is hard. It's a ton of work. The exams are very eggert. He said on the day of the final that there was a question on it that he didn't know the answer to. The biggest piece of advice I can provide is to make sure that you do this with other courses that are easy because this class is a huge time suck.

Eggert tests in 97 are still eggert tests, averages around a 60%. The homeworks are super time consuming, but luckily they're only worth like 5% of the grade, so you don't really need to stress them.
The project is what really makes this class special, I would take it again just for that. React is fun, and you have a ton of flexibility in terms of what you want to make and how you want to make it.
I had a group with some pretty talented guys and we made something that'll look great in our portfolios. Definitely take over 35L.

This class is pretty tough. Eggert exams are pretty hard, most of the averages were around a D for the two midterms, not sure about the final exam. This course is probably going to be changed around a little bit since it was experimental for this year, so I expect it'll only get better, but it was definitely difficult during this quarter as many of the lectures that were necessary to complete homework assignments weren't given until after they were due. However, this worked out okay because the homework assignments were only worth about 1-2% each. The group project is worth 50% of your grade and it's a pretty cool way to build something of your choice in a group, and was an experience that helped me learn a lot, which I appreciate. The exams are just really hard and you just have to diligently go over everything from lectures and go through study guides that TA's and LA's help with. Good luck!

[ONLINE QUARTER REVIEW] I got hammered by 35L, so I really wasn't looking forward to this Eggman class. However, I found that I liked the material a lot more and actually kept up with it through the quarter.
- Lifesaver: https://github.com/CS131-TA-team/UCLA_CS131_CodeHelp
- Do the coding assignments yourself, or at the very least, try for a while before succumbing to github. The TA help code above makes doing the assignments by yourself a lot easier than it may have been in previous years. I found that doing the assignments legit made the midterm and final a lot more manageable.
- Eggert is a very captivating lecturer, but you might feel like he rambles a bit (he does). However, he tests on the obscure parts of his lecture. Make sure you have a transcript of all the notes going into the tests.

My biggest criticism of this class is that as soon as you get good at a programming language, you have to switch to a new one. And the scheme project is a complete bitch.

35L is worth and important. People like to hate on the class, but ultimately the assignments hit important concepts and if you do them well, you'll learn a lot!

Comment on the final: if you don't get behind and learn the content of the assignments as they come, you'll still need to study for the final (for many hours). So, it will be tough and don't get behind.

Comment on the TAs: Joe Halabi, Daniel Meirovitch, Ritah Sarmah, Madhu K. were all competent imo. I think Daniel Meirovitch was the best and most experienced while Joe Halabi was the harshest grader (which only impacts Assignment 10). But any objectively graded assignments are curved across your section, so don't worry too much about that.