Announcements
- 3-May: Final exam is in Emerson Hall 105 from 9:00 AM until 12:00 PM on Friday 5/11/2018.
- 1-May: Remaining homework solutions have been released. Check Canvas.
- 25-Apr: Practice final released on Canvas, available here.
- 24-Apr: Almost all office hours will continue as normal during reading week, except for Prof. Chong's and Dan's office hours on Monday April 30 2pm-3pm and 4pm-5:30pm which are canceled.
- 19-Apr: Assignment 6 released! See Assignments page for more details.
- Old news...
Course information
This course is an introduction to the theory, design, and implementation of programming languages. Topics covered in this course include: formal semantics of programming languages (operational, axiomatic, denotational, and translational), type systems, higher-order functions and lambda calculus, laziness, continuations, dynamic types, monads, objects, modules, concurrency, and communication.
See the lecture schedule for more detailed information on topics covered.
Course staff
- Instructor: Stephen Chong
- Teaching Fellows:
- Dan Fu
- Nicholas Hasselmo
- Jack Obeng-Marnu
- Andrew Wong-Rolle
All questions and issues related to assignments, course content, etc., should be sent to Turn on JavaScript to view the email address . or discussed on Piazza. Questions related to grades, special consideration, etc. can be sent directly to Prof. Chong. In general, sending email to individual course staff will delay a response. Note that course staff may take up to 48 hours to respond.
Time and place
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:00am-11:30am, in Maxwell Dworkin G125 Northwest B103.
Prerequisites
Computer Science 51. Also recommended is Computer Science 121. Students must have good programming skills, be very comfortable with recursion, proofs, basic mathematical ideas and notations, including sets, relations, functions, and induction. See the schedule for some suggested background reading on some of these concepts. Feel free to contact the instructor if you have questions about the requirements or other aspects of the course.
Two points to emphasize: (1) this is not an introduction to programming; students should already know how to program, ideally in at least couple of languages. (2) you must be very comfortable with recursion, proofs, basic mathematical ideas and notations, including sets, relations, functions, and induction.
Homeworks, exams, and grading
There will be an in-class midterm and a final exam. There will be about 6 homework assignments. Some of the assignments will contain a programming component in OCaml and Haskell and some other languages. Prior knowledge of these languages is not required.
- Midterm: Thursday, 1 March. In-class.
- Final exam: Friday May 11, 9am, in Emerson 105.
- Homeworks: 6 assignments. Some will contain a programming component in OCaml, and Haskell, and other languages. See the Schedule page for due dates, and the Assignments page for details of the assignments.
Your grade will be determined by a weighted average of your scores on homework assignments, the midterm exam, the final exam, and class participation. The percentage breakdown (roughly and subject to change) is 50% homework assignments, 20% midterm, 25% final exam, and 5% participation (which includes attendance and participation in class, section, and office hours, and contributing to online discussion).
Textbooks
There is no required textbook for the course. In most cases, the class materials should suffice. The instructor will provide written lecture notes where helpful.
See the Resources page for additional material that you can examine.
Lectures/schedule
See here for more information.
Section
Sections are held:
- Tuesdays 3pm-4pm in MD223 (room unavailable 2/6 and 4/17)
- Wednesdays 2pm-3pm in Pierce 100F
- Fridays 2:30pm-3:30pm in 52 Oxford B150
Section attendance is not required. All sections in the same week will cover the same material. Sections will, for the most part, focus on worked examples and exercises to consolidate material covered recently in class. You should feel free to come to section with questions. We will release practice problems a few days before section. More information can be found here.
Office hours
These office hours may be subject to change, particularly in the first few weeks! Please check back here for updates...
- Mondays: 2pm-3pm, Steve, MD145 (See http://people.seas.harvard.edu/~chong/#officehours to see if they have been changed or canceled)
- Mondays: 4pm-5:30pm, Dan, MD 2nd floor lounge
- Mondays: 7pm-8pm, Nicholas, Eliot DHall
- Tuesdays: 8pm-11pm, Andrew, Pfoho Dhall
- Wednesdays: 10:30am-12pm, Steve, MD145 (See http://people.seas.harvard.edu/~chong/#officehours to see if they have been changed or canceled)
- Wednesdays: 4pm-5:30pm, Dan, MD 2nd floor lounge
- Wednesdays: 6pm-8pm, Nicholas, MD 1st floor lounge
- Thursdays: 8pm-11pm, Jack, Kirkland DHall
Late penalties, collaboration, and other course policies
See here for more information.