Are you interested in the foundations of programming languages and would like to delve a bit deeper? Then “Lambda Club” may be of interest.
Lambda Club is an informal collection of people at the University of
Kent who enjoy and are interested in functional programming and research topics in programming languages, including both students and staff.
In the past, Lambda Club has met sporadically during term time for an
hour, with talks from staff and students including demos, tutorials,
pair programming challenges, or mini lectures on a particular
programming language topics. This term, I have planned a series of
short, informal lectures on the lambda calculus and its use as a
foundation for programming. My current plan digs into both the theory
and practical concerns:
Programme: creating your own language with the lambda calculus as the core.
Session 1: Intro to the syntax and concepts of the lambda calculus,
including operational semantics.
Session 2: A first implementation: parsing, printing, and interpreting the lambda calculus (written in Haskell)
Session 3: More on the implementation of a simple language based on
the Lambda Calculus
Session 4: Formally defining a type system via the simply-typed lambda calculus
Session 5: Algorithmically defining a type system: type checking and
type inference
Session 6: Recursion and strong normalisation theorems
Session 7: Extending our implementation with some more features
Session 8: The Curry-Howard correspondence (types vs. logic)
Session 9: Polymorphism (System F)
Session 10: Implementing polymorphic types (Hindley-Milner algorithm
and related).
Lambda Club will meet on Wednesday at 2pm, usually in SW101. If you
would like to join, please sign up to the mailing list here:
https://lists.kent.ac.uk/sympa/info/lambda-club
Some weeks we will meet in a different room, so do sign up to the
mailing list to find out where we will be. The first meeting will be
Wednesday 2nd October (Week 2) at 2pm in SW101.
Dominic Orchard