Power
Welcome
Welcome to COS 326: Functional Programming. In this course, you will learn about the joy of functional programming: From functions to futures, map-reduce to monads, interfaces to invariants, and types to tail calls.
Getting Started
- First, go to our page on installing OCaml and choosing an editor.
- Second, go to the Course Info page and take a look at the course policies on collaboration, late assignments and other things.
- Third, sign up for Ed (which we use instead of Piazza).
Just browsing?
If you're a Princeton student, not registered for this course but considering it, you can sign up for Ed to get access to lectures et cetera. But please register if you're really going to precept, or at least, please attend a precept that is not closed.
Course Overview
The goal of the course is to delve deeper in to the principles of program design, implementation and understanding. We wish to help students become superb programmers who can design, implement and reason about software that is elegant, efficient, and correct, and whose code can be maintained and reused.
We use a programming language from the ML family of programming languages throughout the course: Objective Caml (OCaml). OCaml is a modern functional programming language with advanced type and module systems. However, the course is not about the OCaml language; rather, OCaml provides a convenient framework in which we can achieve the objectives of the course. Like the object-oriented model of Java, the functional paradigm of OCaml is an important programming model with which all students should be familiar, as it underlies the core of almost any high-level programming language. In addition, the OCaml type and module systems provide frameworks for ensuring code is modular, correct, re-usable, and elegant. In fact, OCaml does support objects, but we will focus more on other aspects of the language. By studying alternatives to object-oriented programming, students will be better equipped to use, implement or even design future programming environments that combine the best features of both worlds. And it turns out that once you understand how to program with functions and modules, many (most?) applications have no need for objects. Indeed, the vast majority of applications you wrote in COS 126 and COS 226 had little need of objects — they were unnecessarily forced on you by the design of the Java programming language. OCaml is a language that allows you to choose when to use objects and when not to.
Another important reason we use OCaml is that it has a relatively clean and simple evaluation model that makes it easier to reason about the correctness of programs. In our studies, we will reason not only about the functional correctness of code, but also the space, time, and other resources used in a computation.
Finally, it is important to learn the principles of functional programming due to its connection with and use in modern, massively parallel applications in data centers. For example, Google's famous map-reduce engine, which they use to implement page rank and a variety of other applications in their data centers, has its roots in functional programming languages. We will learn more about this kind of application in the course.