-Philosophy COURSENUMBER and Linguistics COURSENUMBER
-SHORT COURSE TITLE?
+# Seminar in Semantics / Philosophy of Language #
or: **What Philosophers and Linguists Can Learn From Theoretical Computer Science But Didn't Know To Ask**
+This course will be co-taught by [Chris Barker](http://homepages.nyu.edu/~cb125/) and [Jim Pryor](http://www.jimpryor.net/). Linguistics calls it "G61.3340-002" and Philosophy calls it "G83.2296-001."
+
+
## Announcements ##
-The course meets starting on XXX, at ZZZ, in room YYY.
+The seminar meets on Mondays, starting September 13, from 4-6 in the 2nd floor Philosophy Seminar Room, at 5
+Washington Place. We may be able to shift the time around slightly to suit the
+schedule of participants; but it will remain on Mondays late
+afternoon/evenings.
+
## Overview ##
students.
-## Recommended Readings and Software ##
+## Recommended Software ##
+
+During the course, we'll be encouraging you to try out various things in Scheme and Caml, which are prominent *functional programming languages*. We'll explain what that means during the course.
+
+* **Scheme** is one of two major dialects of *Lisp*, which is a large family of programming languages. The other dialect is called "CommonLisp." Scheme is the more clean and minimalistic dialect, and is what's mostly used in academic circles.
+
+Scheme itself has umpteen different "implementations", which share most of
+their fundamentals, but have slightly different extensions and interact with
+the operating system differently. One major implementation used to be called
+PLT Scheme, and has just in the past few weeks changed their name to Racket.
+This is what we recommend you use. (If you're already using or comfortable with
+another Scheme implementation, though, there's no compelling reason to switch.)
+
+* **Caml** is one of two major dialects of *ML*, which is another large family of programming languages. The other dialect is called "SML" and has several implementations. But Caml has only one active implementation, OCaml, developed by the INRIA academic group in France.
- *The Little Schemer, Fourth Edition*, by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen, currently $23 on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262560992/ref=pd_sim_books/103-5471398-9229403#reader_0262560992).
+* Those of your with some programming background may have encountered a third prominent functional programming language, **Haskell**. This is also used a lot in the academic contexts we'll be working through. Its surface syntax differs from OCaml, and there are various important things one can do in each of Haskell and Ocaml that one can't (or can't as easily) do in the other. But these languages also have a lot in common, and if you're familiar with one of them, it's not difficult to move between it and the other.
+
+[[How to get the programming languages running on your computer]]
+
+## Recommended Readings ##
+
+* *An Introduction to Lambda Calculi for Computer Scientists*, by Chris Hankin...
+
+* *The Little Schemer, Fourth Edition*, by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen, currently $23 on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262560992/ref=pd_sim_books/103-5471398-9229403#reader_0262560992).
This is a classic text introducing the gentle art of programming, using the functional programming language Scheme.
Many people love this book, but it has an unusual dialog format that is not to everybody's taste.
**Of particular interest for this course** is the explanation of the Y combinator, available as a free sample chapter
[at the MIT Press web page for the book](http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/).
- [[How to get the programming languages running on your computer]]
+* *The Seasoned Schemer*", also by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen...
+
+* *The Little MLer*, by Matthias Felleisen and Daniel P. Friedman... This covers some of the same introductory ground as The Little Schemer, but this time in ML. The dialect of ML used is SML, not OCaml, but there are only superficial syntactic differences between these languages.
+
+
## Schedule of Topics ##