Can anyone comment on the differences? I know honors assumes previous programming experience but how does that change the material covered? Which course demands more of your time?
Honors Intro is probably one of the best classes I took here. It teaches Haskell instead of Racket, goes like 3x faster (you cover all of 151 by 5th week essentially, and go on to do harder stuff - and 151 is not considered easy), and has homework due every lecture that would be considered a lab at pretty much any other school. Ravi and Stuart are amaaaaaaaaazing and the work is really fun, though often very difficult.
Don’t take it lightly, though. Every year a large chunk of the class underestimates it, gets stuck in after add/drop (the drop off in difficulty doesn’t happen until it’s too late), and then fails.
162 is very different but also very difficult. You go really fast and learn a lot of languages. A lot of your grade is based on projects posed by other students that you do on your own time. It can be a gigantic time sink, but it’s rewarding. After it you will be able to learn any language in a few hours because you’ll be so used to be being forced to pick up new stuff quickly.
Btw all the lectures and homework are online if you want to see for yourself what it’s like:
http://cmsc-16100.cs.uchicago.edu/2015/
http://cmsc-16200.cs.uchicago.edu/2015/
That sounds both exciting and horrifying.