This semester Dan Licata and I are co-teaching a new course on functional programming for first-year prospective CS majors. This course is part of the new introductory CS curriculum at CMU, which includes a new course on imperative programming created by Frank Pfenning, and a planned new course on data structures and algorithms, which will be introduced by Guy Blelloch this fall.

The functional and imperative programming classes are independent of one another, and both are required for the new data structures class. Both courses share an emphasis on verification techniques (principally, state invariants for imperative programming, and structural induction for functional programming). The new data structures course emphasizes parallel algorithms as the general case, and places equal emphasis on persistent, as well as ephemeral, data structures. This is achieved by using an expressive functional language (Standard ML) that includes both evaluation- and mutation-based computations, and that supports modularity and data abstraction.

Object-oriented programming is eliminated from the introductory curriculum, in favor of a more fundamental view of data structures using imperative programming, and a new course on parallel data structures using functional programming. A new course on object-oriented design methodology will be offered at the sophomore level for those students who wish to study this topic.

Update: The revision of the undergraduate curriculum to which I allude here is described in the report “Introductory Computer Science Education at Carnegie Mellon: A Dean’s Perspective” by Randal E. Bryant, Klaus Sutner, and Mark J. Stehlik. This report summarizes the recommendations of an ad hoc committee of faculty reporting to the faculty and dean of the School of Computer Science.

Update: Word-smithing.

Update: Clarification of data structures courses, and placement of OOP in the revised curriculum.

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