Get ready to spend countless hours a week on these insane projects, especially the first two. Eggerts lectures are very interesting but often are not remotely useful to the homework until AFTER the assignments are due. Midterm and final are a guessing game of what might be on them, pray that you are able to take this class with Millstein instead.

This was my second class with Prof. Eggert. I took 111 with him and had a similar experience. Prof. Eggert is a world class lecturer. The difficulty of the class comes from the coding assignments and the exams. The medians for the midterm was around 60% and the final was around 50%. This is higher than the usual medians. The issue most students have with the class is that the homeworks, as difficult as they are, do not prepare students for the exams. I think this is correct. Doing well on the homeworks does not imply good performance on the exams. This makes the approach to doing well on Eggert's classes less formulaic. To do well you have to understand the material in lectures and the textbook really well. Take detailed notes on lectures and read the textbook. The text book for this class is wordy and not as good as the 111 textbook, but it is still a good reference. The lectures go into greater depth than the textbook and are more important. Go to office hours of the professor to get help on concepts. Go to TA office hours to get help on assignments. I did not go to discussions because the TAs just spoon feed the homework code. A class this challenging is essential to a rigorous computer science education and for developing your intuitive ability. Eggert's goal, in his words, is to "test your intution". Therefore he makes his exams open ended (not really) and really pushes you to reason based on the information you learnt in class and from readings. Regurgitation of notes/readings will not help. All the people who complain aren't interested in maximizing their learning but are more focused on getting good grades. Eggert is incredibly knowledgeable and a treasure of the CS department. I wish we had more classes like this and less classes like that of Prof. Reinman's.
The few criticisms I have are that I thought that the typed reports (homeworks 3 and 6) were not necessary. I didn't learn that much from writing a 5 pg. reports. The TAs also don't provide detailed feedback on them.
The students who usually like Eggert are students who code a lot outside class and like coding.

egg my beloved !!! by FAR the greatest lecturer at ucla ❤️ wish i could take another class with him. can't speak to other profs but definitely advise u take this class w eggert over nachenberg. personally i found the assignments mostly doable in 2-3 days except for the scheme one (hw5) which was pretty rough. project was super ez. lectures were recorded. for exams, advise rewatching lectures (did this on the final and scored ~upper 20%, didn't do this on the midterm and scored median) and doing some extra programming exercises with each of the languages. i also read the textbook chapters, but i'm not sure they were that helpful so if ur short on time id skip those and focus on finishing the lectures. highly recommend taking 131 with eggert, i learned so much from this class and i felt it wasn't that hard to get a relatively good grade.

Goated. Like other Eggert classes, this isn't for everyone, but it's a delight if you happen to enjoy his lecturing style. You'll learn a ton. My sole gripe is the workload. I started this class when I was 20 years old. I'm 24 now.

This class took years off my life. An absurd amount of work if you do it legit

Be prepared for one of the hardest courses you will ever take (but you may know that already -- it's a pretty standard Eggert class). The workload is very rough, where homeworks will take you on average 12 hours/week to complete (according to Eggert himself).

That all being said, this was one of the most interesting CS courses I've taken. You truly do get exposed to the entire field of programming languages and will definitely learn not only languages, but ways to think about code and programming. The assignments, while rough, provide great introductions to all programming styles and languages. Eggert's lectures are also (usually, sometimes not) pretty insightful. Take this course if you want a thorough exposure and experience with programming languages.

Absolute baller. Want to actually learn programming languages? Want to delve into many, many different programming paradigms? Take Eggert. None of that Carey boof.

Eggert. That is all that needs to be said.

Completely agree with the previous reviews. The difficulty and workload of this course is beyond ridiculous. Be prepared for a rough quarter if you do decide to take cs 131 with the project lead of the tz database.

Homeworks were so long and hard that it was even funny. HW 2 and 5 were the challenging ones, but IMO the hardest was HW 3 (Java), the one about multithreaded gzip compression. We had less than a week to do that one, which was not nearly enough time. The only upside about this quarter's HW was that we had an autograder to test our submissions.

As usual with Eggert's exams, they have medians of ~ 50 percent and it is very hard to study for them. While many of the written conceptual questions are quite fair given what was covered in lecture, others were not. Many questions had very little to do with the lectures and seemed so random that you could only make an educated guess and move on.

On the bright side, I'm impressed by the TAs for this iteration of cs 131 (s/o to Matthew Wang and Ashwin Ranade). They were very helpful in explaining key programming languages concepts and clarifying assignment specs on Campuswire. TA Matthew even organized a review session the week before the final to go over the most important concepts in this course and answer any questions students had. And many of the key ideas Matthew emphasized in the review session did end up making its way onto the final!

Looking back, I'm grateful that I learned a lot about PLs and more importantly, how to think critically (mostly from the TAs, less so from Eggert). But given the choice, would I choose to take cs 131 with Eggert? Hell no!

Homework 2 and homework 3 are so ridiculous this class should never ever exist. Please just take it with Carey.
Just to add to this - homework 5 sucks too. Fuck Eggert.