Programming Languages

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