Syllabus

Goals

Successful course participants will:

• • Internalize an accurate understanding of what functional programs mean

  • Develop the skills necessary to learn new programming languages quickly

  • Master many specific language concepts such that they can recognize them in strange guises

  • Learn to evaluate the power and elegance of programming languages and their constructs

  • Attain reasonable proficiency in the OCaml language — and, as a by-product, become more proficient in languages they already know

Prerequisites

The course assumes knowledge of the Java programming language at the level covered in CSE 123. However, students will not program in Java in this course. Instead, Java mainly will be used as a point of comparison for the language that is used (OCaml).

Topics

• • Syntax vs. semantics vs. idioms vs. libraries vs. tools

  • OCaml basics (bindings, conditionals, records, functions)

  • Recursive functions and recursive types

  • Benefits of no mutation

  • Algebraic datatypes, pattern matching

  • Tail recursion

  • Higher-order functions; closures

  • Lexical scope

  • Currying

  • Syntactic sugar

  • Equivalence and effects

  • Laziness, streams, and memoization

  • Implementing languages, especially higher-order functions

To learn these topics using real programming languages and well-suited for them, we will use OCaml, a statically typed, mostly functional language.

There are thousands of languages not on this list, many programming styles not represented, and many language constructs and concepts that would be great to study, but 10 weeks is short! The languages above will serve as representatives for entire programming styles and paradigms.