Key Information
About the content
Investigate the basic concepts behind programming languages, with an emphasis on the techniques and benefits of functional programming. Use the programming languages ML, Racket, and Ruby to learn how the pieces of a language fit together to create more than the sum of the parts. Gain new software skills and the concepts needed to learn new languages on your own.
Syllabus
Note: About half the students completing prior offerings report an estimated workload of 8-12 hours / week is accurate while most of the other half spent more time -- 15 hours / week or more. Workload naturally differs for different people depending on one's background. Do see the recommended-background section below.
Topics (most of which may not mean anything to you until you take the course):
- Syntax vs. semantics vs. idioms vs. libraries vs. tools
- ML basics (bindings, conditionals, records, functions)
- Recursive functions and recursive types
- Benefits of no mutation
- Algebraic datatypes, pattern matching
- Tail recursion
- First-class functions and function closures
- Lexical scope
- Currying
- Syntactic sugar
- Equivalence and effects
- Parametric polymorphism and container types
- Type inference
- Abstract types and modules
- Racket basics
- Dynamic vs. static typing
- Laziness, streams, and memoization
- Implementing languages, especially higher-order functions
- Macros
- Eval
- Ruby basics
- Object-oriented programming is dynamic dispatch
- Pure object-orientation
- Implementing dynamic dispatch
- Multiple inheritance, interfaces, and mixins
- OOP vs. functional decomposition and extensibility
- Subtyping for records, functions, and objects
- Subtyping
- Class-based subtyping
- Subtyping vs. parametric polymorphism; bounded polymorphism
Instructors
- - Computer Science & Engineering
Content Designer
Founded in 1861, the University of Washington is one of the oldest state-supported institutions of higher education on the West Coast and is one of the preeminent research universities in the world.
Platform
Coursera is a digital company offering massive open online course founded by computer teachers Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller Stanford University, located in Mountain View, California.
Coursera works with top universities and organizations to make some of their courses available online, and offers courses in many subjects, including: physics, engineering, humanities, medicine, biology, social sciences, mathematics, business, computer science, digital marketing, data science, and other subjects.
