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By the name you think you are going to keep improving as a programmer, by improving your knowledge in Java, by understanding how some frameworks work, or how certain topics of programming work. In the classes you learn about Lisp, an old programming language that is not used (you will understand why) and Julia, another language that is not much used.
Some topics of the class are interesting but for the most part I don't think that it lives up its name.
✅ The workload is very light, and the course is well organized.
✅ The exam was almost 50% repeated questions from previous years.
✅ The project was fun and connected to what was taught in theory classes. Julia is a very interesting programming language (and so is Lisp, though Lisp very quickly becomes incredibly hard to read).
❌ The theoretical classes are incredibly tiring, with gigantic PowerPoints and slide after slide of written code. For example, some concepts were just a title followed by many slides of code. Either a more practical (live code-writing) approach, or...
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There’s no exam. I had high hopes for the course and ended up a bit disappointed, since the professor didn't cover half the material. He just wasn’t prepared to keep up with MEPP’s pace. The projects were simple and interesting, but the assignment briefs were very vague. You’d ask in the lab if something would be graded, the professor would say no, and then you’d lose 4 points for it. Also, he doesn’t say how much the presentation is worth, but if he doesn’t like it, your grade somehow drops 4 points....
It’s an interesting course.
You can watch videos of the lectures on the course page, it’s pinned in #pava.
The projects can be done in 2–3 days each, so the workload is minimal, and you get to learn some pretty cool stuff about Lisp and related topics.
Professor António Leitão is really chill. He used to work at SISCOG back when they used Lisp in production, so he actually has real-world experience with it.
This year, evaluation consisted of projects, but I think there used to be tests in previous years. The content is interesting, but the lectures felt a bit slow (at least to me), which made it harder to stay focused. The projects were the best part of the course, in my opinion. They are really fun. In previous years, students had to implement things like REPLs for Java, debuggers, etc. This year, the first project was to implement dynamic dispatch in Java, and the second was about making some cool wrappers in Julia....