Misc.

Quotes:

"The language designer should be familiar with many alternative features designed by others, and should have excellent judgment in choosing the best, and rejecting any that are mutually inconsistent"
Sir C.A.R. (Tony) Hoare in "Hints on Programming Language Design" Dec. 1973

"Real world programmers (a) don't really get much of a choice about their language, (b) frequently have to switch languages or use multiple ones, and (c) have to be able to cope with novel and innovative languages, so they cannot perennially fear and loathe that which looks too different."
Shriram Krishnamurthi in comp.lang.scheme 16-Aug-2003.

"Do you really expect us to learn a language in a week?"
91.531 student who will remain anonymous...

Grade distributions

HW1 statistics HW2 statistics HW3 statistics HW4 statistics
HW5 statistics HW6 statistics HW7 statistics HW8 statistics
HW9 statistics Quiz1 statistics Quiz2 statistics Final statistics
"Box-and-whisker" diagrams of grades.
Box-and-whisker diagrams (or Tukey diagrams) are a visual presentation of the quartiles of statistical data. (In this case the distribution of grade points in an assignment.) The line in the box is the median value. The lower part of the box represents the 1/4 of the data that is below the median (lower quartile). The upper part of the box represents the 1/4 of the data that is above the median (upper quartile). The upper whisker reaches to either the highest data point or is 1.5 times the upper quartile range, whichever is shorter. The lower whisker reaches to either the lowest data point or is 1.5 times the lower quartile range, whichever is shorter. If there are data points outside the whisker, they are plotted individually.
In this case, this is just a tool to let you average your returned grades and see approximately where you rank in the class. You know your grade. You can determine in which quarter of the class rank your grade falls. You can get some feel within the quarter.