CS 201 - Spring 2019.

Welcome to CS 201!

Logical problem of the day: 854-917-6320

Lecture 1: Introductory Lecture. 1/14/2019

Discussion of

• Biography. Hybrid: academia (theory) / industry (practice).
  • Yale undergraduate. music major. (studied CS with Alan Perlis)
  • Developed computer systems for presidential campaigns and the White House.
  • Yale graduate student, M.S., Ph.D., computer science (artificial intelligence)
  • Yale Computer Science Department: Assistant Chairman, Assistant Director of the Yale AI Project, Lecturer.
  • NYU Stern School of Business, Department of Information Systems, Assistant Professor.
  • Wrote three books (T/Scheme, LISP, decision making) - dedicated to Yale alumnae.
  • Developed investment and risk technology systems for Wall Street. Sell side (Morgan Stanley), Buy side (INVESCO, Bank of America, Commonfund)
• Syllabus,
• I have office hours Wednesdays from 2-4 pm, Room 014 AKW. Also, I invite students to join me for lunch in a residential college after class on Wednesdays.
• Note: You will be required to learn UNIX, as well as Racket/Scheme. Questions about UNIX will appear on all exams.
• Other courses to consider
  • CS 112. Introduction to Programming

    Benedict Brown
    TTh 11:35-12:50
    Development on the computer of programming skills, problem-solving methods, and selected applications.

    Note: if after a few weeks in CS 201, you feel you are in over your head, you are permitted to transfer to CS 112, even if it is after shopping period. In order to preserve this option, you must keep the TTh 11:35 time slot open. CS 112 will make it possible to catch up.

  • CS 200. Introduction to Information Systems

    Stephen Slade
    MWF 10:30-11:20pm
    Information technology is ubiquitous. This course focuses on the real world artifacts and implementations that comprise the vital computational organisms that populate our world. Topics include hardware (computer architecture), software (programming languages, databases, networking), and related issues such as security, and software engineering. Examples stress practical applications of technology. Homework assignments will generally involve programming in Python.

  If you're thinking of taking CPSC 201, please do the following.

• Complete this online Student Information form.
• Get a course account for CPSC 201 on the Zoo. When you register for this class, your course account should be created within one hour or so of signing up.
• Confirm your piazza account. Yesterday, I created piazza accounts for the class. You should have received an email requesting that you validate your account. The guys at Canvas have alerted the Yale community that Piazza now automatically shares your information with potential employers and their ilk. ( how to turn this feature off.)
• Start the reading assignment: [Assignments].
• Familiarize yourself with the Zoo computers by attending a (soon-to-be-scheduled) Zoo help session, or with classmates or on your own using the Zoo tutorial, Spring 2014 edition.
• (Optional.) Download and install DrRacket on your computer (Racket) and familiarize yourself with it (Choose language: "Use the language declared in the source", #lang racket. Then press the Run button to actually change the language.) If you don't want to install and run DrRacket on your machine, you may run it in person or remotely using your Zoo account.

  Perlis epigram 19: A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.

  The language we'll use this term, Racket, is an offshoot of Scheme, which is an offshoot of LISP, which was designed as a higher-level language for writing artificial intelligence programs. We choose Racket because it is high-level, functional (as opposed to imperative), emphasizes recursion, and is unfamiliar to almost all students taking CPSC 201. It is definitely not widely used in industry. One goal is for you to learn new tools and paradigms for programming, to "affect the way you think about programming." It will be frustrating at times -- no assignment statements, no obvious analogs of for and while statements -- but it will expand your view of what programming can be.

  We conclude with a gentle demonstration of Scheme (Racket) in action: 0114.rkt in which we do the following:

  • define a list comprising 10 digits
  • define a function, num-to-word, which takes a single digit, num, and returns the corresponding English word, e.g.,

    (num-to-word 9) ==> "nine"

  • define a function, word-to-num, which is the inverse of num-to-word. Note that we define a sub-function within the function itself. The sub-function, find-index, is recursive.
  • We then try out the functions.
  • Here is a transcript of today's class.

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