Programming Languages, Part A

University of Washington via Coursera

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Overview

This course is an introduction to the basic concepts of programming languages, with a strong emphasis on functional programming. The course uses the languages ML, Racket, and Ruby as vehicles for teaching the concepts, but the real intent is to teach enough about how any language fits together to make you more effective programming in any language -- and in learning new ones. This course is neither particularly theoretical nor just about programming specifics -- it will give you a...

Syllabus

Introduction and Course-Wide Information (Start Here)

Welcome! Start here! Learn about this course and how it's organized.

Software Installation and Homework 0

This module contains two things: (1) The information for the [unusual] software you need to install for Programming Languages Part A. (2) An optional "fake" homework that you can turn in for auto-grading and peer assessment to get used to the mechanics of assignment turn-in that we will use throughout the course. You can do this module either before or after watching the first few "actual course content" videos in the next module, but you will want to get the software installed soon so you can learn by actively trying out variations on the code in the videos. You will need to install the software to do the homework.

Section 1 and Homework 1

It's time to dive in! Start with a careful reading of the "Section 1 Welcome Message" and go from there.

Section 2 and Homework 2

This section is a particularly rewarding one where a lot of ideas come together to reveal a surprisingly elegant underlying structure in ML. As usual, start with the welcome reading, dive into the material, and leave plenty of time to approach the programming assignment methodically.

Section 3 and Homework 3 -- and Course Motivation

This section is all about higher-order functions -- the feature that gives functional programming much of its expressiveness and elegance -- and its name! As usual, the first reading below introduces you to the section, but it will make more sense once you dive in to the lectures. Also be sure not to miss the material on course motivation that we have put in a "lesson" between the other videos for this week and the homework assignment. The material is "optional" in the sense that it is not needed for the homeworks or next week's exam, but it is still very highly encouraged to better understand why the course (including Parts B and C) covers what it does and, hopefully, will change the way you look at software forever.

Section 4 and Part-A Exam

We finish Part A of the course with this module. As explained in more detail in the welcome message, we discuss type inference, ML's module system, and the fundamental idea in computing of two computations being equivalent. There is no programming assignment -- instead there is an exam covering all of Part A. Finally, there is a brief wrap-up video for the end of Part A that also looks ahead to Part B and Part C -- we have put it after the exam, so don't overlook it.