Change in TA office hours

Teaching Assistant Deepal Dhariwal needs to change her Tuesday office hours from 9:30-11:00am to 1:00-2:30pm effective this week.

HW5 is out

Homework five is out and due on Wednesday November 9.

John McCarthy dies, inventor of Lisp, AI pioneer

Computer Science pioneer John McCarthy reportedly died in his sleep on Monday. He was 84. He is noted for creating the Lisp programming language, making ground-breaking contributions to Artificial Intelligence (including naming the field), adding important results to the mathematical theory of computation, and helping to develop computer time sharing. He studied mathematics under John Nash at Princeton

McCarthy held the first “computer-chess” match between scientists in the US and the USSR, transmitting the moves by telegraph. The soviet team ran on inferior hardware and used Claude Shannon's brute-force Type-A strategy while the MIT team had an IBM 7090 implemented Shannon's more sophisticated Type-B approach that used a heuristic plausible move generator. The Soviets won.

McCarthy was born in 1927 in Boston and taught himself higher math using Caltech textbooks when his family moved to the area, allowing him to take advanced classes when he enrolled as a teenager. He received a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1951.

He won the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1972 and the National Medal of Science in 1991. Over the years, he held faculty appointments at Princeton, M.I.T., Dartmouth, and Stanford University, where he spend his las 39 years.

Midterm in class on Mon Oct 24

The 331 midterm exam will be given in class on Monday October 24. The exam will cover everything we discussed in class as well as the material in chapters 1-4 and 15 in our textbook.

A good way to prepare is to look at some of the previous midterm exams. You should also check in on the midterm forum on the 331 Blackboard site regularly.

The material covered in CMSC331 differs from semester to semester and instructor to instructor. You will not be held responsible for subjects or material that we did not cover in class, in a homework or ask you to read before October 24. The more recent midterms (e.g, since 2004) in sections that I've taught will be more relevant.

HW4 is out

HW4 is edited and the calc files updated.

Maybe we should wait for the Dart native VM

The Dart compiler turns hello world into 17,260 lines of javascript?!?! See the code.

Dart: Google's new web programming language

Google unveiled its new web programming language Dart today. Its described as a "class-based optionally typed programming language for building web applications". Dart has a native virtual machine and can also be compiled into JavaScript, allowing it to run on any modern browser. Google hopes that Dart will replace JavaScript as the main built-in scripting language in web browsers. See more here.

Are you learning the right programming languages?

Do you know the right programming languages? Depending on your objective, the most important one to know might be Java, Python, PhP, C, or even Haskell.

IEEE Spectrum has a short article on The Top 10 Programming Languages that is based on data from David Welton's Programming Languages Popularity site which "attempts to collect a variety of data about the relative popularity of programming languages".

HW3 is out

HW3 is our and is due by midnight on Wednesday October 12.

Example python programs that use grammars

We put online two small example programs that use grammars.

• cfg has a simple program generate.py that can generate strings from a grammar.
• chart has a program chart.py that can parse strings using a grammar.

No optional python lecture Wed 9/28

We won't have an optional python lecture from 12-1 this Wednesday, September 28. We'll resume on Monday.

HW1 grades emailed

We emailed HW1 grades and feedback to student's UMBC email address yesterday. If you submitted HW1 but did not rceive an email message with the grade form, please let us know.

HW2 corrections

We've made some minor corrections to HW2. Lok for areas marked in red on the HW2 page.

HW2 is out

HW2 is available.

HW2

HW2 should be out before class tomorrow, Monday 9/19.

No Python tutorial lectures this week

We won't have the noon python tutorial lectures this week on Monday or Wednesday. They will resume next week on Monday 9/26. The slides we are using are linked from the class schedule.

Python 101 lectures

We'll hold Python 101 lectures on Mondays and Wednesdays from 12:00 to 1:00pm in FA 306. We will hold these (probably) on September 12, 14, 19, 26, 28 and 31.

TA office hours

The TAs have announced their office hours:

James MacGlashan (ITE 339) Mon: 10:00-11:30, Thr: 2:00-3:30

Deepal Dhariwal (ITE 349) Tue: 9:30-11:00, Wed: 4:00-5:30

331 FAQ and Resources

We've added a link to a 331 FAQ to the navigation bar in our Web page template. We also updated the Resources page (linked from the navigation bar). See both for help on common topics (e.g., GL, Submit, etc.)

Vote on times for the optional Python intro. lectures

We'll decide by Wednesday when the extra Introduction to Python lectures will be. If you want to take them and have not done so already, please express your constraints at this doodle poll.

HW1 Survey is available

The required survey on what programming languages you know is available on Blackboard. Click on the button labeled Cource Content to find the survey.