
Online course from the creator of Scala, starting this September - pedro-pinto
https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun
======
petercooper
_We are a social entrepreneurship company that partners with the top
universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for
free._

What's the business model? I can see why Odersky might want to promote his own
language but more generally, why would someone of his caliber devote the time?
Philanthropy? Or do the universities pay?

~~~
nl
I believe companies are paying them for access to the best students of
specific courses (for recruiting).

For example, the Princeton Algorithms course says:

 _.. Coursera will maintain limited data regarding student progress and
performance in this course and, with your permission, provide authorized third
parties with access to such data._

<https://www.coursera.org/course/algs4partI>

Given what recruiting fees are, I'd imagine this could work quite well. It is
unclear how well it will scale, but if they can keep their costs low enough it
may not need to.

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davidf18
Odersky is also Chairman and Chief Architect of Typesafe which promotes Scala
and is backed by Greylock Partners. Typesafe offers its own courses as well.

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thebluesky
That is seriously impressive. How many universities get the creator of a
language in to teach you how to use it?

~~~
bartonfink
The big one that comes to mind is Stroustrop at Texas A&M.

~~~
zackzackzack
Which is sort of an odd situation.

I took a CS intro class at Texas A&M there and he came in at the end of the
semester to talk more about C++11x. So he ended up going off about support for
threading and things that were way over most people's heads and how the
language was getting all of these new features.

From a university standpoint, every intro CS class is C++ for the most part.
There is some Java thrown in, and maybe some Python, but all of the
algorithms/data structures, really the meat of the basic CS education, is all
in C++ because of him. Other professors do some of their research in C++
mainly because they can just walk down the hall and ask him questions about
the language if need be.

I think for grad students he would be an awesome resource to have. For the
undergraduates, he has cast a strong and complex shadow on the department. The
environment has become you learn C++ and then go into the
Oil/Engineering/Accounting industry.

No major point here, just reflecting on the topic of "Stroustrop at TAMU"

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frou_dh
His Clojure analogue Rich Hickey gives great presentations at conferences. If
he had the time and/or means to do a course, it'd also be excellent news.

Edit: Though I don't think he's affiliated with a university. Oh well, there's
still lots of good Clojure-oriented stuff available:
<http://alexott.net/en/clojure/video.html>

