Hacker News Reader

Dan Grossman’s Programming Language series on Coursera is one of the best courses I’ve taken at any level of education

For guitarists, Paul Davids’ courses through his website are excellent

Would you recommend this for a proficient programmer with a decade of experience in non functional languages?

If you have any interest in functional programming and higher-order programming, or understanding the functional parts of languages you use now, then I'd say yes. At least as the course was structured a decade ago or whenever I took it. A lot of "non-functional" languages have functional influences. If you'd like to get a better idea of what those are and how they can be used more effectively and for higher-order programming, it would be a good course to take.

In addition to what the other comment says, I found that his class drastically sped up my ability to pick up new programming languages. The class teaches an underlying "grammar" that's common to all programming languages, almost like a linguistic approach. I also learned a "meta-language" by which to speak about (and effectively Google/research) any programming languages.

Is that the one that uses Standard ML?

Yep for part A. B and C use Ruby and Scheme I think

Reply on news.ycombinator.com