X-Git-Url: http://lambda.jimpryor.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=lambda.git;a=blobdiff_plain;f=index.mdwn;h=0ae6d5ead9d405fd96ad3012abe1671af27af073;hp=53c7b588622769446f123579538baae5a9c4d5a0;hb=a5cde834781109f49fde431e38c769e8892bc645;hpb=3c3f15e8c5589af6e6ed81c2547762e1d879613c diff --git a/index.mdwn b/index.mdwn index 53c7b588..0ae6d5ea 100644 --- a/index.mdwn +++ b/index.mdwn @@ -1,11 +1,17 @@ -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 ## @@ -75,7 +81,7 @@ Other keywords: the Curry-Howard isomorphism(s) monads in category theory and computation --> - + ## Who Can Participate? ## The course will not presume previous experience with programming. We @@ -84,32 +90,97 @@ languages, and we will encourage experimentation with running, modifying, and writing computer programs. The course will not presume lots of mathematical or logical background, either. -However, it will demand a certain amount of comfort working with such material. -And it wouldn't be especially well-suited to be a first graduate-level course +However, it will demand a certain amount of comfort working with such material; as a result, +it will not be especially well-suited to be a first graduate-level course in formal semantics or philosophy of language. If you have concerns about your background, come discuss them with us. -It hasn't yet been decided whether this course counts for satisfying the logic requirement for +It hasn't yet been decided whether this course counts for satisfying the logic requirement for Philosophy PhD students. -Faculty and students from outside of NYU Linguistics and Philosophy are wlecome +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 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. + +* Those of you 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 Caml, and there are various important things one can do in +each of Haskell and Caml 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]] + +[[Using the programming languages]] + +[[Family tree of functional programming languages]] + +## 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). + +* (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 +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.) + + +* *The Little Schemer, Fourth Edition*, by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias +Felleisen, currently $23 on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/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/). + +* *The Seasoned Schemer*, also by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen, currently $28 +on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/Seasoned-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/026256100X) + +* *The Little MLer*, by Matthias Felleisen and Daniel P. Friedman, currently $27 +on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/Little-MLer-Matthias-Felleisen/dp/026256114X). +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. [Here's a translation +manual between them](http://www.mpi-sws.org/~rossberg/sml-vs-ocaml.html). + +##[[Schedule of Topics]]## - *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/). +##[[Lecture Notes]]## - [[How to get the programming languages running on your computer]] +##[[Offsite Reading]]## -## Schedule of Topics ## +There's lots of links here already to tutorials and encyclopedia entries about many of the notions we'll be dealing with. -To be added. ----