Introduction to Functional Programming (TDA555, DIT440)

Welcome!

Visit the course home page for up-to-date information.

• chalmers.instructure.com/courses/7316
• Lectures, exercises, links to videos and course material
• Programming assignments (first deadline is on Monday in week 2)
• Find invitation to Slack and Fire in the announcement

Teachers

• Thomas Hallgren
• Elisabet Lobo-Vesga
• Sarkar Abhiroop
• Jeff (Yuting Chen)
• Felix Naredi
• Gunnar Stenlund
• Sarosh Nasir

Student representatives

• Chalmers	GU
  Kevin Bäckstäde Mirco Ghadri Linus Sundkvist Vera Svensson Filip Torphage	... ... ... ... ...

• Will be listed on the course home page

Course organization

• Lectures: 2 per week
• Exercise sessions: 1 per week
• Supervised lab sessions: 8-10 hours per week, max 26 groups at the same time
• TimeEdit
• Slack
• Fire

What is Functional Programming?

• Programming?
  • program comes from greek: pro- (before) graphein (to write / carve)
  • So a program = instructions that are written down beforehand
  • to carve means to cut with care or precision
• Functional?
  • We write programs by defining functions (and other things).
  • We mean functions in the mathematical sense.

Functions

Not a function

Haskell

• Haskell is the programming language we will use in this course.
• Haskell is a general purpose programming language (like other popular languages, e.g. C, C++, Ada, Java, Python, Go, Rust).
• Haskell is a functional programming language (unlike most popular programming languages).
• Haskell is a high-level programming language.
• The first version of Haskell was published in 1990.

Implementations of Haskell

• The first Haskell compiler (HBC) was created here at Chalmers in 1990.
• We will use GHC (the Glasgow Haskell Compiler):
  • An interpreter (GHCi), for easy interactive testing.
  • An advanced optimizing compiler, for running program efficiently.
• It is installed on the computers in the labs,
• It's free, so you can also install it on your own computer.

Getting started with Haskell

Start GHCi in a terminal window

ghci GHCi, version 8.4.4: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ :? for help

Live Demo

• A gentle introduction to writing programs in Haskell
• Source code: Intro.hs

Quiz

Kahoot

Summary

• We have seen
  • Function definitions and comments
  • Computations with numbers and lists
  • Definition by cases and recursion
  • Types
  • Property-based testing
• Now you can
  • Try the exercises for week one (to get familiar with GHCi)
  • Start working on the first assignment