Goal: be able to explain paradigms and building blocks of major program languages and their tradeoffs.

Roadmap:

• Functional Programming with Haskell
• Deep Dive into Python
• Data Structures & Types
• All Things Functions
• OOP
• Control Structures
• Logic Programming with Prolog

What is a Programming Language?

A structured system of communication designed to express computations in an abstract manner. A programming language can be used to define programs that specify the behavior of a computer.

Each language is designed to address a particular category of problem, research area, or business domain.

Common Paradigms

• Imperative: made up of statements, loops and mutable variables
• Object Oriented: Programs are organized into classes and objects
• Functional: Made up of math-like functions. No statements or iteration, only expressions, functions, constants and recursions
• Logic: programs define a set of facts

Specifying Detail of Programming Language

For every programming language, we need to specify syntax and semantics.

Syntax: the overall “grammar”(tokens, how we write the program)