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I have no idea what you're talking about. Grossman's course is barely covering an introduction to programming languages (literally, the course my sophomore year

I have no idea what you're talking about. Grossman's course is barely covering an introduction to programming languages (literally, the course my sophomore year of college covering the same material was called "introduction to programming languages"). I guess you could say that there's nothing "special" about Haskell, but the same would be true of Arc. I think Racket is the real champion in Arc -- a truly flexible programming language laboratory.

kyllo 14y ago
Yeah, Grossman's course covers SML, Racket, and Ruby. Haskell is not even part of the course at all.
dschiptsov 14y ago
His course covers the ideas behind so-called functional programming paradigm - high-order functions , environments, lexical scooping, closures and the standard idioms, including currying and lazyness. This course about concepts behind programming languages, not languages themselves.
- Locke1689 14y ago
  Yeah. That's an introduction. You basically didn't mention anything that wasn't covered in the untyped lambda calculus at the beginning of the last century.
  - dschiptsov 14y ago
    Yeah, but that is enough for computers to work.) Inside a computer everything is a number - sometimes a number represent itself, sometimes it is a pointer (a number of a byte, an offset) and sometimes it is a code, a number of an unicode character, etc. The key idea there is that a pointer points to everything, value has a type, not a pointer. There are no pointers-to-integers along with pointers-to-booleans and pointers-to-strings. There are only numbers here. Having one kind of pointer for all is the semantics of untyped lamda calculus. We could cons everything with everything, we could have heterogeneous lists, tuples, whatever. Well, it seems that untyped lambda calculus are good-enough.) Perfection is achieved when there is nothing to remove, and not adding features is sometimes more wise.

kyllo 14y ago

Yeah, Grossman's course covers SML, Racket, and Ruby. Haskell is not even part of the course at all.

dschiptsov 14y ago

His course covers the ideas behind so-called functional programming paradigm - high-order functions , environments, lexical scooping, closures and the standard idioms, including currying and lazyness. This course about concepts behind programming languages, not languages themselves.

Locke1689 14y ago
Yeah. That's an introduction. You basically didn't mention anything that wasn't covered in the untyped lambda calculus at the beginning of the last century.
- dschiptsov 14y ago
  Yeah, but that is enough for computers to work.) Inside a computer everything is a number - sometimes a number represent itself, sometimes it is a pointer (a number of a byte, an offset) and sometimes it is a code, a number of an unicode character, etc. The key idea there is that a pointer points to everything, value has a type, not a pointer. There are no pointers-to-integers along with pointers-to-booleans and pointers-to-strings. There are only numbers here. Having one kind of pointer for all is the semantics of untyped lamda calculus. We could cons everything with everything, we could have heterogeneous lists, tuples, whatever. Well, it seems that untyped lambda calculus are good-enough.) Perfection is achieved when there is nothing to remove, and not adding features is sometimes more wise.