CSE 341: Programming Languages

• Schedule
• Homeworks
• Projects
• Other Resources

Course Information

Goals of the course

The goal of this course is to make you a better computer scientist by teaching you to understand programming deeply. We will:

• program idiomatically in a variety of languages to expand your mind and to clarify what is essential about programming;
• discuss the design space of programming languages and its various tradeoffs; and,
• reason carefully about the behavior of programs, including correctness and performance.

Overview

The course divides roughly into two parts. We will spend the first five weeks or so programming in Standard ML, where we will learn basics of functional programming, type systems, and modularity. Then we'll spend the second half of the course programming in Racket, where we will throw off the shackles of the type discipline and discuss why that may or may not have been a good idea, all the while enjoying the enveloping beauty of the s-expression.

Links to course tools

• Piazza (Required. Important course announcements will be made on Piazza.)
• Catalyst Dropbox (Turn in homework here.)
• Catalyst Gradebook (Check grades here.)
• Anonymous Feedback (Sent to James.)
• CSE Department Policy on Academic Misconduct

Assignments and Grading

The primary workload in the course will be homeworks, due approximately every week. You are encouraged to collaborate on homework with classmates, but your solutions should be your own.

Two projects will replace the midterm and final. These are designed to be similar to homeworks in structure, difficulty, and time commitment. However, no collaboration or discussion is allowed on projects.

Finally, please come and introduce yourself and have a few minute chat with me at some point during the quarter.

These components will be weighted as follows.

Late Policy

Life is hard. In response, we would like to be flexible on deadlines. However, unlimited flexibility is unfair to your classmates and to those of us who grade assignments.

To balance these concerns, you may use up to three late days throughout the quarter. Late days may only be used on homeworks, they do not apply to individual projects.

If something comes up that prevents you from completing an assignment on time (for example, if you are out of late days, or if late days do not apply to the assignment), please get in touch, and we will work something out. It is never too late to ask for help, even if it's the night before (or after) it's due. :)

Schedule

Homeworks

Individual Projects

Other Resources

• Dan's previous iteration of the course (includes all notes and videos).
• SML resources:
  • www.smlnj.org
  • user's guide
  • standard-library documentation
  • Programming in Standard ML
• Racket resources:
  • The Racket Guide
  • racket-lang.org, particularly the Documentation tab
• Going beyond:
  • Practical Foundations for Programming Languages
  • Types and Programming Languages
  • Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
  • CSE 505, UW's graduate PL course
  • Software Foundations, a graduate PL course from UPenn, focused on formal verification