Lambda the Ultimate

Gilad Bracha gives a pretty compelling argument with good examples on why we should favor subsumption over other things (ADT/inheritance) in "Subsuming Packages and other Stories".

Hi,

I am TAing an undergraduate course on Programming Languages and the instructor has asked me to conduct my discussion on functional programming. The students would also be required to implement a project using a functional language (Erlang). I am looking for ideas about what the project should be. The timeline for the project is 5 weeks.

I have come up wih the following two and welcome any critical remarks about these ideas:

1. Mapreduce - Implementation of mapreduce and then an application based on mapreduce. I thought it would be interesting to ask the students to do a sequential implementation and then parallelize and then compare the results.
2. Purely functional data structure - This is based on the thesis of Chris Okasaki http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/theses/okasaki.pdf . I am considering asking students to implement a variation of queue data structure such as "Hood - Melville real time queues".

I would be really glad if I could get some ideas/comments.

Thanks