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 seminar meets on Mondays from 4-6, in
+This course is co-taught by [Chris Barker](http://homepages.nyu.edu/~cb125/) and [Jim Pryor](http://www.jimpryor.net/). Linguistics calls it "G61.3340" and Philosophy calls it "G83.2296"
+The seminar meets in spring 2015 on Thursdays from 4-7, in
the Linguistics building at 10 Washington Place, in room 104 (back of the first floor).
-One student session will be held every Wednesday from 3-4. The other will be arranged to fit the schedule of those who'd like to attend but can't make the Wednesday time. (We first proposed Tuesdays from 11-12, but this time turns out not to be so helpful.) If you're one of the students who wants to meet for Q&A at some other time in the week, let us know.
-
-You should see the student sessions as opportunities to clear up lingering issues from material we've discussed, and help get a better footing for what we'll be doing the next week. It would be smart to make a serious start on that week's homework, for instance, before the session.
-
-There is now a [[lambda evaluator]] you can use in your browser (no need to install any software).
-It can help you check whether your answer to some of the homework questions works correctly.
-
-There is now a [library](/lambda_library) of lambda-calculus arithmetical and list operations, some relatively advanced.
-
-There's also a page of [advanced challenges and techniques](/lambda_advanced) for the untyped lambda-calculus.
-
-
<!--
- To play around with a **typed lambda calculus**, which we'll look at later
- in the course, have a look at the [Penn Lambda Calculator](http://www.ling.upenn.edu/lambda/).
- This requires installing Java, but provides a number of tools for evaluating
- lambda expressions and other linguistic forms. (Mac users will most likely
- already have Java installed.)
--->
-
-
-## Lecture Notes and Assignments ##
-
-(13 Sept) Lecture notes for [[Week1]]; [[Assignment1]].
-
-Topics: Applications; Basics of Lambda Calculus; Comparing Different Languages
-
-(20 Sept) Lecture notes for [[Week2]]; [[Assignment2]].
-
-Topics: Reduction and Convertibility; Combinators; Evaluation Strategies and Normalization; Decidability; Lists and Numbers
-
-(27 Sept) Lecture notes for [[Week3]]; [[Assignment3]].
-
-Topics: Recursion with Fixed Point Combinators
-
-(4 Oct) Lecture notes for Week 4
-
-<!-- Introducing the notion of a "continuation", which technique we'll now already have used a few times
+One student session will be held every Wednesday from 3-4 on the
+fourth floor at 10 Washington Place.
-->
-[[Upcoming topics]]
-
-
-##[[Offsite Reading]]##
-
-There's lots of links here already to tutorials and encyclopedia entries about many of the notions we'll be dealing with.
+## Announcements ##
## Course Overview ##
into established philosophical and linguistic problems.
This is not a seminar about any particular technology or software.
+
Rather, it's about a variety of conceptual/logical ideas that have been
developed in computer science and that linguists and philosophers ought to
know, or may already be unknowingly trying to reinvent.
Of necessity, this course will lay a lot of logical groundwork. But throughout
we'll be aiming to mix that groundwork with real cases
-in our home subjects where these tools play central roles. Our aim for the
+in our home subjects where these tools play central roles.
+
+Our aim for the
course is to enable you to make these tools your own; to have enough
understanding of them to recognize them in use, use them yourself at least
in simple ways, and to be able to read more about them when appropriate.
+<!--
Once we get up and running, the central focii of the course will be
**continuations**, **types**, and **monads**. One of the on-going themes will
concern evaluation order and issues about how computations (inferences,
* if time permits, "indeterministic" or "preemptively parallel" computation and linear logic
-<!--
Other keywords:
recursion using the Y-combinator
evaluation-order stratgies
in formal semantics or philosophy of language. If you have concerns about your
background, come discuss them with us.
+<!--
This class will count as satisfying the logic requirement for Philosophy
PhD students; however if this would be your first or only serious
engagement with graduate-level formal work you should consider
prepared for this course, and (2) whether you'd be better served by
taking a logic course (at a neighboring department, or at NYU next year)
with a more canonical syllabus.
-
+-->
Faculty and students from outside of NYU Linguistics and Philosophy are welcome
to audit, to the extent that this coheres well with the needs of our local
familiar with one of them, it's not difficult to move between it and the
other.
+<!--
+<a name=installing></a>
[[How to get the programming languages running on your computer]]
[[Family tree of functional programming languages]]
+[[Translating between OCaml Scheme and Haskell]]
+
+## What is Functional Programming? ##
+
+Here's a [survey conducted at Microsoft](http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=141506) asking programmers what they understand "functional programming" to be. Don't take their responses to be authoritative... this is a just a "man in the street" (seat?) poll.
+
+Read more about the [uptake of Haskell](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers-announce-discovery.html) among programmers in the street.
+-->
## Recommended Books ##
* *An Introduction to Lambda Calculi for Computer Scientists*, by Chris
Hankin, currently $17 on
-[Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Lambda-Calculi-Computer-Scientists/dp/0954300653).
+[Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0954300653).
* (Another good book covering the same ground as the Hankin book, but
more thoroughly, and in a more mathematical style, is *Lambda-Calculus and Combinators:
-an Introduction*, by J. Roger Hindley and Jonathan P. Seldin. If you choose to read
+an Introduction*, by J. Roger Hindley and Jonathan P. Seldin, currently $52 on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0521898854). If you choose to read
both the Hankin book and this book, you'll notice the authors made some different
terminological/notational choices. At first, this makes comprehension slightly slower,
but in the long run it's helpful because it makes the arbitrariness of those choices more salient.)
+* (Another good book, covering some of the same ground as the previous two, but also delving much deeper into typed lambda calculi, is *Types and Programming Languages*, by Benjamin Pierce, currently $61 on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0262162091). This book has many examples in OCaml.)
* *The Little Schemer, Fourth Edition*, by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias
Felleisen, currently $23 on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262560992).
manual between them](http://www.mpi-sws.org/~rossberg/sml-vs-ocaml.html).
-
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