CPSC201-ComputerScience.docVIP

CPSC 201 Course Lecture Notes Spring 2008 Day 1 (Jan 14) Welcome and preliminaries: Are you in the right course? (distribute handout) Email: via classes*v2: classesv2.yale.edu Course website: plucky.cs.yale.edu/cs201 Class on Friday this week, and not next Monday TF: Amittai Aviram – see website for office hours (TBD) Two required texts: Omnibus and SOE More-or-less weekly homework assignments, plus two exams. CPSC 201 is the hardest course to teach in the CS curriculum. Primarily because this question is hard to answer: “What is computer science?” Is it a science? …a physical science? …a natural science? Or is it more like mathematics? …or engineering? One could make an argument for all or none of these! It is not the study of computers – any more than astronomy is the study of telescopes. Nor is it is the study of programming – any more than literature is the study of grammar. Dewdney’s approach (our textbook) is to give enough examples of cool ideas in CS that you will just “know” what it is kind of by osmosis (in the same sense that one just “knows” pornography when one sees it). Broadly speaking, computer science is the study of information, computation, and communication. The purpose of CPSC 201 is to give a broad overview of this. There is another cross-cutting theme that underlies CS, and that is abstraction. There is an interesting CACM article (Vol 50(4), April 2007), called, Is Abstraction the Key to Computing?” In my textbook, I ask the question, “What are the three most important ideas in programming?” to which I offer the answer, “Abstraction, abstraction, abstraction.” (Like the real-estate question.) Functions are a good abstraction for programming, because they imply computation (taking an input and returning an output) and determinacy (one answer instead of many). Haskell is particularly good at abstraction. (More on this later.) Abstraction is not that unfamiliar to the average person. In fact, there are often multiple levels of abst