Pretty much like all the other reviews have already said.

Don't take this class, but obviously you have to take it so take it. You'll get through it fine.

Bad. I don't know what I learned and I don't know what I'm looking at when he's drawing diagrams. The only good parts of lecture is when he shares his personal anecdotes or is funny. If you've already taken 111, workload-wise this class is not as bad; the projects are way shorter than 111. Taking 161 is also helpful because Lisp is similar to the languages you have to pick up in this class.

This is the most pointless and unreasonably tough courses I have taken at UCLA. You will teach yourself 90% of the material. The projects, with the exception of hw1,hw4, and the project, are all unreasonably difficult and convoluted, and really, nobody knows whats happening and you can bet that tons of students in the course are githubbing most of the hard parts. The exams are written the night before, as stated by the professor, and the averages can wildly vary from 50%-70%. Make sure you read the book and/or review lecture to perform as well as one can on his exams. As usual with eggert you can expect a fat curve at the end but its never consistent so you cant rely on it. FWIW, when I calculated my raw grade with all assignments/exams graded I had a 59.9, and came out with a C .

Honestly people should be pretty prepared for a difficult class whenever it's with Professor Eggert. Projects are time consuming (especially for the second OCaml and the Scheme one). Tests are difficult but something might help for all Eggert tests: they are more about intuitions, so basically whenever you come up with some sort of answer, just write, don't even bother to think too much or too deep about the them. Just let your intuition guide you through would be less confusing and might give better outcomes. Ahhh all that being said I do learn many things in this class and honestly Eggert lectures are good, it's homework and tests that sucks :))

I mean... it's Eggert.
This class is insanely hard, because it's Eggert. The tests are difficult even after watching every lecture, studying, doing the projects, and reading the textbook. That's just how it is. But the curve is great! Midterm and final were both very low averages, but significantly curved, as is classic in Eggert's classes. The lectures focused on the theory behind programming languages in general, as well as the theory behind specific languages (OCaml, Prolog, Java, I'm probably missing one). The projects were much more focused on exploiting specific features of those languages. The final project was non-programming, but rather a comparison of features among a few languages based on what we'd learned in the class. Projects were /insanely/time-consuming if you didn't have help, so start early and set aside a lot of time.
Lectures, as always with Eggert, were engaging and interesting, but kinda hard to follow since they are rarely organized and linear.

[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.

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.

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 !!

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 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.