Education

Edinburgh University, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Semester I

The exam results came back and the first year is finally over, therefore I have decided to share my impressions about the individual lectures in the first two semesters. Hopefully it will help someone to choose one subject over another, not to make the same mistakes when preparing for the exams that I did, or simply to get the taste of the first year in college. Please bear in mind that all what is written below represents only my personal, highly subjective opinion.

1 Night in Haskell

1 Night in Haskell

Functional Programming
Professor: Philip Wadler

Lectures: a wonderful introduction to the functional programming. Amazing teaching skills and professor's authority in the classroom - from ripping a T-shirt to reveal a big superman-lambda, to being one of the principal engineers and designers of the Haskell programming language - 10 out of 10.

Exam: Final grade is made by a programming class test (10%) and a final exam (90%). The programming class test is pretty straightforward - three simple tasks to test one's basic knowledge of Haskell (things you need to know are the syntax, because it's done on paper, list comprehension, recursion and simple library functions). The final exam is done in front of computer with plenty of time (2 hours) for three simple tasks (e.g. take a list of integers and return the sum of the cubes of the positive numbers in that list). The only catch is that the same problem has to be solved in a couple of different ways: using basic functions, using list comprehension, using recursion and using the higher-order functions, however... at the end of the day - it's still the same problem.

My advice in succeding in this subject: participate in the class' programming competition (see this years competition and my entry). If you'll manage to get something done - you won't need to spend any more time to prepare for the final exam, and I can hardly imagine how you'd get less than an A (my personal result - 99). Continue reading

 
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