Lambda the Ultimate

I was looking for something that makes the connection explicit, but isn't too watered down. I know of The Algebra of Programming but I never had a chance to read it, and from the website, it doesn't seem to be what I am thinking about.

I want something that can a expose a student to the connections between the classical concepts he learned, and the theoretical framework. I am thus looking for something on the introductory side. It must, of course, still be rigorous.

Anyone know of such a beast? Frank?

I took another look at the online info about The Algebra of Programming, and it looks closer to what I had in mind that I had remembered. Is the TOC available anywhere? Couldn't find it.

I've had some vague ambitions of writing something like that myself at one point, but it won't be in the near future. (Certainly not until I finish my thesis, and I doubt I will be much in the mood to start a huge writing project very soon after that...! :)

Personally, since I was thinking about an executable approach, one would have to choose a language. Haskell seems like the best bet, at the moment at least. Do you agree?

My style of teaching is largely based on papers, so a list of papers, organised according to the outline would be nice. I think this can be a nice thing to include somewhere here or on your site.

Graham Hutton has some nice papers that I'd be tempted to use.

I haven't found a nice introductory discussion explaining the connection between the theory and the practical concepts of SE.

BTW: The closest thing I could find is Goguen's courses (here's the second one) that use OBJ.

One more thing: What's the best way of making such a course FUN?

As for your very last question, how to make it fun, one thing I thought would be very fun to use as a running case study in the tutorial for my still non-existent language Arrow would be a MUD, since this hits almost all the important points of a modern, practical application (concurrency, persistence, network I/O, user interface) and emphasizes some of the strengths of FP (parsing, symbolic processing, etc.). Also, Arrow is supposed to be good at metalinguistic reflection, and showing that typed FP languages are suitable for such a dynamic application would be, I think, convincing even to nay-sayers.

I think it can be done in pieces, too: start with a command-line parser, then use a graph data structure to model rooms, connect them to be able to move between rooms, add persistence to remember the states, add concurrency to allow multiple users, spiff up the user interface with a GUI, and so on.

Of course it's a big project, but the point is to show that big projects become smaller and more tractable when you use sophisticated languages.

Yep.

I like the case study approach, esp. when teachning about SE. I was considering giving my Ada&SE students a set of exercises leading to a web broswser. Obviously they would'nt know the end reuslt, but will suddenly see how well designed components can be combined..

But are we really thinking about people with no SE background? Seems to me there's too much stuff to cover. I thought about something for people who know what an ADT is, in general, but are unawre of the mathematical treatment.