Advanced Programming, MSc CS (Autumn 2018)

Abstract

This course addresses advanced programming techniques, with a special attention on functional programming and its applications. The course is a perfect balance of theory and practice, with focus on the Scala programming language.

Description

The student who passes this course will know relevant advanced programming techniques for designing, testing and executing challenging realistic programs in Scala, in a correct and efficient way. Such techniques, although learned in the Scala programming language, are relevant for many other mainstream programming languages used in industry.

• Introduction to Scala 
  
• Property-based testing 
  
• Monads and streams 
  
• Call-by-name and lazy programming 
  
• Immutable data-structures 
  
• Purely functional parallel programming 
  
• Finger trees 
  
• Lenses and data synchronization  
  

Formal prerequisites

- You can program in Java (You will survive the course if you can program well in C# or any other main stream object-oriented language, but your experience may be steeper) - You know basic functional programming including higher order functions, anonymous functions (or lambdas, delegates or anonymous inner classes), side-effect-free programming, generic types and methods - You know basic algorithms and data structures (sorting, searching, collection data structures and basics of algorithms complexity) - You know basic discrete mathematics (sets, functions, relations) - You have followed an introductory course on programming languages The above competences can be obtained by following an introductory programming course, an introductory algorithms course and a course on programming languages ('Programmer som Data' or Programming Language Concepts and Implementation or equivalent.). If you have followed all these courses you are well qualified.

Intended learning outcomes

After the course, the student should be able to:

• Design, test and execute functional programs in Scala
• Use expressive types (polymorphism, type functions, higher-kinded types) to document library interfaces
• Recognize monadic structures in computation, use libraries following monadic structure and design monadic libraries
• Reason about eager and lazy evaluation, including advantages and disadvantages of either
• Reason about API designs in pure and stateful style, including exploring various designs and considering advantages and disadvantages of either
• Use eager and lazy evaluation to design data structures and benefit from existing lazy data structures such as streams
• Implement solutions based on research-based methods presented in relevant papers in library and language design
• Design and implement solutions using lenses, reason about lenses

Ordinary exam

Exam type:
A: Written exam, external (7-trinsskala)
Exam description:
Duration of exam: 4 hours The same set of questions as for professional Master students, plus additional one concerning the intened learning outcome: "Design and implement solutions using lenses, reason about lenses"