Alfred Aho

Aho is apparently retiring, so perhaps this review won't be useful anymore. However, he also tried to retire 2 years ago and is still here, so I'm not really sure what he is doing? In general, I enjoyed the class. I thought the homeworks in particular were very well thought out – 5 problems, only 5 homeworks per semester and he drops the lowest grade. They neatly covered the concepts and they weren't easy, but they weren't too hard. With some help from office hours, I learned a lot from completing the homeworks, and got good grades on all of them. Aho's office hours are quite good, but the TAs helped a lot as well. That being said, unfortunately I did feel like I learned a lot more from the homeworks than I did from the class. Aho is not a very engaging lecturer – he talks very slowly in a monotone voice. He also fails to go over very many examples for a lot of the theorems, because they are common sense to him (he is a very Smart Man). I do, however, believe that you can learn to learn from Aho – at the beginning of the semester I felt lost at every lecture, but towards the middle and end I realized that if I attended class and wrote down everything he said, then went over it later for ~30 minutes with the online lecture notes, I could definitely understand the material. Note: apparently Aho is also the only one who teaches lambda calculus (other than Verma, who is new). Alth…

In all, Professor Aho was a pretty interesting teacher who went over quite a bit of useful material in an ultimately fulfilling class. He is friendly and always willing to talk, and is very approachable during office hours. I would recommend him for CS4115.

God, poor Aho. This class had an enrollment of about 9 and a daily attendance of about 3. He makes a diligent and sincere effort to teach well, but tends to get derailed (particularly with the constant stream of irrelevant questions that this class seemed to be all about). The lectures are dull, but he's a nice guy and knows everything... it just doesn't work out somehow.

This class was a huge time sink. I was up all night for three of the programming assignments, and I did not miss class (although most did). Professor Aho does have difficulty explaining things in a way that varies from his lesson plan. He did cover the material, that is about the best you can say.

Insane. Who cares about machine language? I just want to learn the basics of programming. The homework problems were impossible, although the programming was hard yet doable. This professor needs to understand that anybody interested in compsci as a major would be scared away by this course. Comp sci is not this hard. An intro level course has no need for 0 and 1 machine language programming. "1000000100000100 // R0 = M[5]; load memory location 5 into R0" Well thanks I'll remember that next time i have to tell the machine how to load numbers into the CPU! Honestly one of the worst classes I have ever taken. Need I even elaborate on the fact that close to nothing was ever taught in class that could later be used in homeworks or programming assignments? Anyways, I'm done venting. Take my advice: If he is teaching any kind of intro class, flee it and take another one. This was ridiculous.

Where to start? Aho has an impressive background; no one would deny that he doesn't know computer science well. He cowrote his own major programming language called "AWK" and teaches far above an introductory level. The class does start extremely slow, learning HTML and Javascript before the heavy Java programming approaches. Alfred will give you a great first impression. Then you will wonder what evil lurks beneath his genial facade when he screws you over somehow. But by the end you will see he is not such a bad guy. As for the class, much of the lecture is boring, repetitive, and sometimes incomprehensible. The review session will tell you what is on the exams. During class I brought my laptop and chatted/checked email every day; listening when appropriate. I recommend this to any student; otherwise class may be so boring that you will stop showing up.

Very underwhelming class. I chose to take CS Theory with Aho due to his fame...in hindsight, this was a bad decision for me. I'm sure there are other people who feel differently, but this was my experience: Lectures- Aho seems to think that the material is a lot easier than it actually is, often failing to adequately explain simpler concepts in favor of complex proofs, etc. that never appeared on homeworks or exams. This is probably due to the fact that he pretty much invented a lot of it; however, for most of us, this was our first experience with theoretical computer science. Aho also just plainly isn't an engaging lecturer. Listening to him lecture is a lot like listening to your great-uncle drone on about the Great Buckwheat Shortage of '68 (if your great-uncle is a great storyteller, then ignore this). Occasionally, Aho will talk about having dinner with Stephen Wolfram or working with Kernighan and Ritchie at Bell Labs, which is always cool but doesn't necessarily make the class worth taking. Homeworks- hard, but doable. There were five problems per problem set. They were problems that you had to do out and solve, which turned out to be useless because: Exams- both the midterm and final were 10 true/false questions (with brief explanation). I just don't understand how ten true/false questions can adequately assess your knowledge of CS Theory. For the midterm, I studied a…

If you are interested in programming languages or are required to take PLT to graduate, I would strongly encourage that you take this course with a different professor. In the beginning of the semester, you will think that Aho's lectures are pretty cool and engaging. Moreover, there is a sense that you are basking in glow of computer science rock-stardom (he is one of the co-authors of the famed "Dragon Book" text that you will be using for the class). But, after the first three or four weeks, we were often told to just look in the book to learn about any new concept. In fact, each new idea that was introduced was concluded with the words "go look in the book." He gives affectations to being devoted to his students, and I remember going to office hours several times to ask about topics that weren't being elucidated particularly well by the book. Each time, he forgot my name, and at the end of the (short) conversation, his helpful response was -- guess what? -- "go look in the book." This was irresponsible teaching, and he's able to get away with it because he is tenured and famed within his field. His teaching style would improve vastly if he could only say "go look in the book" in other ways, like "refer to the book for more details" or "the book contains much more information on this topic" or even "read the book and it will explain this concept better than I can ever explai…

Very light, although this could vary in the future -- 3 PowerPoint presentations and a ten page technical document (half of it is screenshots and console output).

This is supposed to be an intro class, but Aho made it too hard for people with out experience. He is a brilliant man, but unless you already know a lot about comp sci, you are about to get totally screwed over. TA's didn't even know how to solve all of the hw problems. This class was torture to me.