professor answers no questions. ta's answer few questions. students write poems on piazza crying regarding the workload. plenty of students skip the final because they already failed to turn one or two of 7 hw/projects. we cover way too much material and the work load will kill you. we had 2 projects due within 2 days of each other during 10th week. lecture is a complete waste of time. the book (although interesting) is useless for the tests/projects.
i seriously do not encourage you to take this professor. if you have to take this professor, be ready to guess your way through tests.

Like most of the courses Eggert teaches, the material is quite interesting and has a lot of potential for being really enjoyable. Unfortunately, the way its taught makes the course frustrating.

To start off, the lectures are engaging but are often irrelevant for the content that's going to be tested. If listening to a really great computer scientist talk endlessly about the history of CS and take countless tangents into obscure details (often unrelated to assignments) is your thing, Eggert's your guy. For example, there have been numerous times when Eggert STARTed lecturing on course content that would have been VERY useful to have while working on the project... the project that was due yesterday.

TAs in this class are your best friend. Find a good one, read homework specs before discussions, and ask the TA as many questions as you can. The homeworks are incredibly time-consuming and confusing. I feel like I was able to pick up the languages we worked on somewhat quickly but even so, I spent an average of ~15 hours working on each of the 6 homeworks (and one project).

To say a few good things about the course:
- Learning a diverse set of languages is really cool. You realize that the way the languages you initially learned (C, C++, Python, JS, etc.) take a lot of features for granted that don't necessarily need to be done that way.
- Once you understand how to do the homeworks and get a groove going, it can actually be kind of fun.

As someone who watched friends take 131 with Millstein, it blows my mind that Eggert's 131 class fulfills the same requirement as Millstein's. In short, 131 with Eggert is dramatically more time consuming and challenging than with Millstein. The projects in this class are incredibly difficult due to the strangely vague specs, the lack of consistency between what's taught in lecture and what's required in the projects, and the amount of time these projects take. Be prepared to spend anywhere from 15-30+ hours a week on this class, depending on the current week's project. One positive note about the projects is the incredible help we get from the TAs. These are some of the best TAs I've had in all of my time here.

Much better than Eggert's CS 33. Concentrate in class, and you will learn a lot.

Open-book midterm and final so textbook necessary. Selling textbook for Eggert 131: Modern Programming Languages for 40 dollars (original price 80+) text **********

I had him for 33 and 131, and his 131 is miles better. He covered a lot of materials (the whole webber textbook + some scheme and python concepts), but he did cover 80% of them well and with good clarity. He also used stories and jokes to help us understand concepts.

Some of his homework is quite fun, like the first OCaml homework and the Prolog homework, but others are either too hard or unable to cover the core essence of a language. For example, the Scheme assignment failed to cover continuation and the Java assignment failed to cover OOP. The second OCaml homework is too hard and I hope he can at least mention some of the ideas in class.

The Python project is fun, too, but it took too much time to figure everything out and it was a pain to finish both the project and the last homework in week 10.

His exams are "more normal" than those from his 33 (!!! definitely much harder than other professor's exams !!!). I'm not sure if he wants to be a nicer guy or he always gives easier exams in 131.

His final covers some details in the book. I suggest to read the whole Webber textbook to not only improve your understanding but also prepare for the exam.

He's a good professor and interesting lecturer absolutely, but the workload is so heavy, and his exams are so tricky. His homework is so hard to understand. I spent a lot of time reading the ambiguous descriptions again and again rather than making progress, which is annoying. I learnt a lot about programming, but I hate wasting time understanding his homework descriptions.

I took 131 and 130 with Eggert.

Eggert is very engaging as a lecturer in 131, and the material is interesting. The textbook is pretty good but not especially memorable. Exams have surprisingly low average scores. Why? You have to know not just the languages you learned, as well as the lecture and reading material, but you also have to know how to tackle somewhat open-ended questions by applying what you learned. And to *write*. Yes, my fellow programmers, you have to learn how to do this thing called writing. And unfortunately that's not taught in the class. If you are able though, try to find exams from past years to see the style of questions.

As for projects, let me say first that you can go see what they are: the class websites showing the projects from previous years stay up, and the projects rarely change. Some projects are kind of just crappy and dubiously relevant to the class (I'm thinking of the Java concurrency one in particular) but most are interesting, eye-opening, and yes, quite challenging. You need to think in a new way - and especially, think in the spirit of the language you are using. Start early.

Take Eggert, you'll like the lectures and you'll learn a lot.

(Millstein's a great guy too though.)

On the other hand, Eggert's 130 is horrible. I can't really blame him though, because I can see how hard it is to design a class on software engineering effectively.

I found the homeworks to be pretty interesting, but they're definitely time consuming, so start early. The exams are also as difficult as people say they are (we had an average of 51% on the midterm and 59% on the final). That being said, Professor Eggert is definitely enthusiastic about teaching the material and explains most concepts fairly well. I also recommend the textbook, because it came in pretty handy during the exams.

He is an amazing professor. Just go to his class for a few hours and you're off to the races. However, his projects are the STUPIDEST thing I have ever seen in my life. They take ridiculous amounts of time. They're fun as hell, I'll give him that, but he assigns them as though 131 was the only class you were taking.

For example. Homework #2. Took me 40 hours, started over 7 times. And I never even finished it. Most of the class didn't, from what I heard.

Anyway, tl;dr: this dude is a great professor, but someone needs to kick him in the friggen shins until he realizes that that's exactly how his projects feel to us.