Syllabus

Course Description

Welcome to CPSC 490X — Programming Language Paradigms

We’re gonna be exploring functional programming, logic programming, and some dependent types :)

Course Staff

Anahita Golshani (she/her) xa@student.ubc.ca (student coordinator)

William J. Bowman (any) wilbowma@cs.ubc.ca (faculty sponsor)

I (Anahita) am the coordinator for this student directed seminar. Feel free to reach out to me over email with any questions or concerns about the course materials or logistics. If you don’t feel comfortable discussing your concern with the coordinator, feel free to send an email to the faculty sponsor, William Bowman instead.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the course, you should be able to:

• Compare functional, logic, and dependently typed paradigms and identify when applying each one could be beneficial.
• Recognise when to employ advanced type system features to encode structural and correctness invariants to catch otherwise difficult to find bugs at compile time.
• Explain the correspondence between mathematical objects and programming and be able to solve complex mathematical problems by writing programs.
• Design and build a large nontrivial project in a functional or logic paradigm, use idiomatic patterns for the language, and communicate design choices in formal writing.
• Have fun :)

Prerequisites and Preparation

The only formal prerequisites are a 3rd or 4th year standing. However, this course is written with the expectation that students will have a background in functional programming. Experience in 110 is likely sufficient, but 311 is preferred.

Class and assessments will also include extensive computer use. For class, consider bringing (or sharing) a device.

Evaluation

Your course mark will be based on the following breakdown. The course staff reserves the right to change this scheme in ways that will not hurt any student’s grade.

In addition, we have Bonus Points. For every power of two you reach in bonus points, we shift 1% point of weight from the category with your lowest grade to the category with your highest grade. And there are other fabulous rewards that come with Bonus Points!

Academic Concession and Regrade Requests

If circumstances arise in your life that negatively affect your work, tell us about it. We guarantee to at least keep a record of your concerns to review at the end of the term. Remember that communicating sooner (and ideally before deadlines) is better than later, and anytime is better than never.

While we listen to concerns any time, to get a regrade, you must make a clear and complete request within two weeks of your grade being available, using the feedback mechanism for that assessment. A good request lays out all issues you have with the grading with clear reference to the question, your solution, any provided solution and rubric, and the grading to show how you believe your solution should have been graded differently.

For PrairieLearn assessments, submit an “issue” on the individual question. For in-class participation or the project, contact Anahita. For later assessments, we may reduce the two week period for regrade requests.

For regrades, the course staff will review the marking in context and respond with a final grade. The grade can go up or down based on review. The reviewed grade is final, but you are still welcome to communicate further concerns to us.

For other concerns, see UBC’s Review of Assigned Standing policy.

Important Dates

Also see our Schedule.

Schedule

Here is a tentative schedule of topics. Depending on our progress and interests, we may move faster or slower through some parts and add or drop topics.

Communication

Outside of lecture time, most communication with the course staff should go through discussion in Piazza, or sometimes via issues on PrairieLearn. For private matters you’re not comfortable sharing there, definitely feel free to e-mail us. In terms of online systems, we will use this website, Piazza, and PrairieLearn.

Assignments

Our series of short assignments will focus on hands-on practice with the course material. The assignments are primarily for your practice and learning. We will design grading for each assignment to reflect that: allowing full credit even before you reach a fully correct solution. Assignments will be submitted on PrairieLearn. In each assignment, look for the “maximum points” on a question to see how many of the available points you need to earn for full credit. Each assignment (except possibly the last) will also list a late submission deadline for 75% credit.

Assignments are to be completed and submitted individually, but with some caveats you may collaborate with anyone and any resource. Refer to the Academic Conduct guidelines right away for the caveats. (Roughly speaking: acknowledge any person/resource that helps you and take a short break before writing up your own solution on your own.)

In-Class Exercises

In-class exercises will also be completed as “homework” on PrairieLearn. Each set of in-class exercises scales your mark so that earning 90% of the available points on the exercise is worth a 100% mark. As with assignments, each exercise set (except possibly the last) lists a late submission deadline for 75%. If lecture runs faster than expected, we will leave in-class exercise deadlines unchanged. If lecture runs slower than expected, we will extend in-class exercise deadlines.

You may work freely with others on in-class exercises.

Participation

In-class participation includes asking and answering questions in class and on Piazza, volunteering to solve problems in class, and posting interesting course-related pointers to Piazza.

Term Project

Outside of lecture and assignments, a majority of the time spent in this course will be dedicated to a course project completed in teams of 2 (or 3 if the amount of students is odd). You will have substantial freedom in the topic of your project, but it must use either one of: Haskell, Prolog, or Idris (or another similar language you clear with the course staff at the project proposal stage).

There will be three major stages to the project:

1. Submitting a 2-page typeset proposal detailing the project scope, the course concepts applied, the extensions past the course context expected, and a feasibility plan.
2. Complete a working prototype at a level of polish acceptable to share with your peers, then present it (with a slideshow or video).
3. A typeset report (4-8 pages) and a complete, well documented repo (with testing!)

Academic Conduct

Collaboration enhances the learning experience. We encourage collaboration in various ways throughout the course, subject to the rules stated here.

Course staff: You can ask us for help and show us solutions regardless of any limits below.

In-Class Exercises: We welcome collaborative work and use of resources on in-class exercises (even if you’re working on them outside of class!). Do try problems yourself first! It helps with learning.

In-Class Participation: When the course staff isn’t addressing the class or specifically asking you to work alone, we welcome you discussing participation questions with your neighbors. In the end, you have to participate for yourself, however!

Assignments: Assignments are your individual work. You may also work with any person or resource subject to these rules:

• Spend 15 minutes trying each problem yourself first.
• Collaboration with others is for planning, experiments, discussion, and brainstorming. Take no record away from the session (no files, notes, stone tablets, etc.), except your collaborators’ names, which you’ll need below.
• After collaborating, do something else for 30 minutes that is so distracting that you must have learned anything you can then reconstruct. (Have fun!)
• Write up your own solution independently, using your own words and code. (Where you copy/quote from resources, cite and acknowledge as always!)
• Acknowledge all collaborators and resources in your submission except the course staff.

Our Piazza site is a bit of a special case. To encourage discussion, we are allowing posting assignment solution snippets there in questions, but keep them short and to the point.

Projects: Projects are group work. Within your project group, you may collaborate however you wish. You may also work with any person outside your group or any resource subject to the rules for assignments above with the addition that you may use packages/libraries and adapt existing code (both with clear citation) as needed.

Violation of any of these rules constitutes academic misconduct and is subject to penalties ranging from a grade of zero on a particular assignment to indefinite suspension from the University. If you are uncertain as to what is or is not reasonable collaboration, or you’re having problems understanding or keeping up, please contact the instructor or a TA. Don’t cheat! It sucks the soul from the course.

Generative AI Policy

For the purposes of this course, LLMs (i.e. ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) are considered non-group-members and are subject to the rules for assignments. LLM-assisted codegen (i.e. Cursor, Claude Code, etc.) is expressly prohibited.