I remember at CMU, the sophmore level programming language theory course (the name escapes me, it was 15-212) was wildly different than anything I had done before. All programming courses one took up to that point were the normal intro level courses that most passed out of and a data structures/algorithms course. Sitting down the first day and being introduced to SML along with language constructs with no analogue in the programming languages I knew was tough. I struggled for about a month, much like I imagine many do when learning about pointers: you may be able to do some of the work, but you don't have a proper conceptual model to be able to reason about it. All of a sudden, after re-reading the material from the beginning, everything just clicked. It was probably my favorite undergraduate CS course from then on.
I remember at CMU, the sophmore level programming language theory course (the name escapes me, it was 15-212) was wildly different than anything I had done before. All programming courses one took up to that point were the normal intro level courses that most passed out of and a data structures/algorithms course. Sitting down the first day and being introduced to SML along with language constructs with no analogue in the programming languages I knew was tough. I struggled for about a month, much like I imagine many do when learning about pointers: you may be able to do some of the work, but you don't have a proper conceptual model to be able to reason about it. All of a sudden, after re-reading the material from the beginning, everything just clicked. It was probably my favorite undergraduate CS course from then on.