Earlier at the start of this month, I began the second Programming Languages course (Part B), offered by Prof. Dan Grossman of the University of Washington. I had done the first course a few months ago and found it very beneficial when it came to my understanding of some functional programming concepts and idioms, the notion of elegance in programming and good programming practices in general. It also really helped me formalise much of what I had come across in relation to Functional Programming, and approach the adoption of this style of programming more systematically in my own day-to-day programming projects. After nearly two months of having done that very interesting and challenging course, and having felt that a good bit of it had sunk in I decided to take on this second one.

The goals of this course were three-fold:

1. To allow one to apply some of what was taught in the first course in the context of Standard ML (SML) to a new programming language, namely Racket.
2. To introduce features of Dynamically Typed programming languages through Racket, and compare these in contrast with those of Statically Typed programming languages, such as SML.
3. To understand the inner workings of a language interpreter by implementing one for a very simple hypothetical programming language in Racket.

I won’t be going into much details about the learnings of this course yet. I plan to do so in a couple of months when I’ll be done with the third and final course in this module and I will have had the chance to re-visit the contents of the first two courses to gain a better overall perspective.

In the meantime, here’s the certificate I was awarded for completing it.

Having been curious about Functional Programming for a while now, and tried incorporating features of the paradigm into my own work with Python, I decided to give the first (Part A) of the three-part Programming Languages course module on Coursera. The module is meant to systematically introduce one to various theoretical concepts of programming languages, while having a special focus on Functional Programming. This first course (Part A), which I recently completed with a score of 98%, illustrated said concepts with the help of Standard ML – a Functional-style language.

It was excellently designed course, and also quite challenging. Apart from spending time on introducing the very basics of SML early on, it covered some very interesting concepts such as Pattern Matching, Function Closures, Partials, Currying and Mutual Recurstion. The programming assignments really made sure you understood what was covered in the course material, and the course-handouts were thorough and clear. There was also a strong focus on the matter of programming style, with the instructor commenting on what he considered good/poor programming style while covering the various concepts. We were marked on the style of our submissions too.