Category Archives: teaching

Subtracting natural numbers: types and usability

Posted on February 7, 2023 by Brent

For several years now I have been working on a functional teaching language for discrete mathematics, called Disco. It has a strong static type system, subtyping, equirecursive algebraic types, built-in property-based testing, and mathematically-inspired syntax. If you want to know … Continue reading →

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Implementing Hindley-Milner with the unification-fd library

Posted on September 8, 2021 by Brent

For a current project, I needed to implement type inference for a Hindley-Milner-based type system. (More about that project in an upcoming post!) If you don’t know, Hindley-Milner is what you get when you add polymorphism to the simply typed … Continue reading →

Posted in haskell, teaching | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Types versus sets in math and programming languages

Posted on June 24, 2021 by Brent

For several years I have been designing and implementing a functional teaching language especially for use in the context of a Discrete Mathematics course. The idea is for students to be exposed to some functional and statically-typed programming early in … Continue reading →

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Hendrix teams at ACM ICPC

Posted on November 4, 2018 by Brent

Today I took five students from Hendrix to Fort Smith to compete in the Mid-Central USA Regional of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). Both teams solved five out of ten problems, and finished second and fourth out of … Continue reading →

Posted in meta, teaching | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Future of Coding podcast interview

Posted on May 19, 2018 by Brent

I recently did an interview with my friend and former student Steve Krouse for his Future of Coding podcast. I think I still agree with almost everything I said, and I didn’t say anything too embarrassing, so if you want … Continue reading →

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Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming

Posted on May 6, 2018 by Brent

My six-year-old son walked up to me yesterday. “What are you reading?” At the time, I was reading part of Janis Voigtländer’s habilitation thesis. Unsure where to even start, I decided to just answer straightforwardly: “I’m reading a very long … Continue reading →

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Test your intuition: logarithmic time

Posted on February 28, 2018 by Brent

Here is a question to test your intuition for logarithms. NO CALCULATORS allowed, and don’t take a long time to work out an answer in your head! Just go with your gut. After you have committed to a choice (say, … Continue reading →

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Sum of heights in a binary tree

Posted on November 3, 2017 by Brent

Executive summary: every year when teaching data structures I always forget how to analyze the cost of building a binary heap, which amounts to summing the heights of all the nodes in a full binary tree. So I’m writing down … Continue reading →

Posted in math, teaching | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Algorithms lecture notes and assignments

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Brent

I just finished teaching our algorithms course for the second time. The first time around, last spring, I was always scrambling at the last minute to prepare for class, make new assignments, and so on (although I did have some … Continue reading →

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My new programming languages course

Posted on January 13, 2017 by Brent

tl;dr: my new PL course is now finished, and all the course materials are freely available. Working through all the exercises should be a great option for anyone wishing to learn some basics of programming language design and implementation. Last … Continue reading →

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