{"id":991,"date":"2010-04-19T18:09:07","date_gmt":"2010-04-20T01:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/?p=991"},"modified":"2010-04-19T18:09:07","modified_gmt":"2010-04-20T01:09:07","slug":"cmpt-383-for-real-this-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/2010\/04\/19\/cmpt-383-for-real-this-time\/","title":{"rendered":"CMPT 383: for real this time"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have mentioned here before that I was planning to teach CMPT 383<\/a>. It ended up being a no-go this semester because of a very productive capstone project team<\/a> (more on that later).<\/p>\n

But, I’m on-deck to teach it in the summer. The class is full; the waiting list is full; must be time to plan a course. After much soul-searching, I have decided there will be three main topics in the course and they will be covered in this order:<\/p>\n

\n
Functional programming (and Haskell)<\/dt>\n
\n

\nThis will be most students’ first introduction to a non-imperative programming paradigm (and associated language). Every little while I think this won’t take long, then I remember the list of things that have to be introduced to get anywhere with Haskell: being really good at recursion, list comprehensions, lazy evaluation, type inference, higher-order functions, and other stuff to be discovered as I try to teach the language.<\/p>\n

\nFrom my perspective, there are two reasons to be talking about functional programming. First, it’s finding some relevance, probably because people want to parallelize things (e.g. CouchDB<\/a>). Second, there are important lessons from functional programming that can be transferred to OO programming<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n

“Language Features”<\/dt>\n
\n

This section contains the big concepts of the course: type systems (static\/dynamic, strong\/weak, type coercion, duck-typing, late\/early binding, …), interpreted vs compiled, pointers vs references, memory management, reflection, runtime environments, first-class functions, objects, exceptions, mutable\/immutable objects, ….<\/p>\n

The basic question here is: what are the real differences between the programming languages you have to choose from? How might they affect your choice of language for a project?<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n

Logic programming (and Prolog)<\/dt>\n
\n

As much as I am aware that Prolog is pretty much confined to old school AI researchers, I still think there’s some value in being exposed to logic programming. It should be possible to translate back to the OO world the idea of expressing a problem as a series of constraints and then looking to satisfy those constraints.<\/p>\n

To be fair, this is the chunk I am most unsure of. Part of the reason it comes last is that if anything should fall off the end of a full semester, it’s this.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n

The exact balance of the topics remains to be seen. I’ll guess 5 weeks, 5 weeks, 3 weeks.<\/p>\n

As for getting marks, I am as far as:<\/p>\n

    \n
  • Lab exercises: weekly hour-or-two chances to practice the concrete skills.<\/li>\n
  • Assignments: like… two of them? One Haskell, one Prolog?<\/li>\n
  • Project: pick a somewhat obscure language from a list I provide. Explore it by writing a report and some programs with it.<\/li>\n
  • A midterm and a final exam.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    No idea what I’ll ask on the exams. Maybe Warren has some old ones I can look at.<\/p>\n

    So there it is. Unless I change my mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I have mentioned here before that I was planning to teach CMPT 383. It ended up being a no-go this semester because of a very productive capstone project team (more on that later). But, I’m on-deck to teach it in the summer. The class is full; the waiting list is full; must be time to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching","category-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=991"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1008,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/991\/revisions\/1008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}