Less annoying than fundies 1, but still tries to Jacket

Read the lecture notes

Very tough class. The use of Racket as a language is justified by the professors for two reasons: It "helps" instill design fundamentals, and it prevents people from gaining an unfair advantage if they already know the language, since Racket is the opposite of not a commonly learned language. The problem is that Racket is needlessly difficult as a language to use in a general fundamentals course as it was designed for making other languages. This makes it so that many times, you may have the right idea of what to do to code a problem, but the actual coding part takes up 75% of your time and a million tries. This would not happen in a popular language such as Java because there's so much help out there on the internet you can Google. "BuT gOogLe iS CHeaTinG" no it's not as long as you hav...read more

Be prepared to dedicate your evenings and weekends to this class ESPECIALLY if you have a bad HW partner. Switching partners will likely not help either since the only other people switching partners also have bad partners and you will likely end up with another bad partner. If you expect to be able to go out and party on Fridays and Saturdays, think again because you will either not do well in this class or spend so much of your remaining time on it that you do poorly in other classes. For the second half of the semester, I simply chose to drop my focus on this class in order to lift up my other classes. I was taking 5 classes so definitely do not do that, 4 is the absolute max number of classes you should take in a semester with this.

Ben Lerner is not a good professor. He teaches the accelerated sections as well as the normal sections and therefore he tends to go very fast in lecture and treats his normal sections as if they were accel. He is also very snarky and rude to students who have questions that he doesn't view as "good" questions, perhaps they aren't deep enough or he already explained it while rambling through lectures at lightspeed, but either way many students are scared into not asking questions. He is also extremely egotistical and will insult you and hate you forever if you point out a mistake he does wrong or ask about doing anything in a way that you discovered that is different from his way. Lerner is definitely one of the bottom 3 professors I've ever had.