PFPL reading schedule

We're starting Robert Harper's Practical Foundations for Programming Languages! We'll meet every Friday night at Bento Miso at 6:30pm unless otherwise specified. Come and join us!

If you can't attend in person but would like to read along, we have a Slack channel where we can discuss solutions to problems without spoiling them for future readers, and a google group where you can ask help from a wider audience. Our Slack is quite lively, so that's a great place to ask questions, achieve confusion, and help other readers. If there's enough remote interest we'll set up a weekly google hangout as well.

We're starting with the Part One of PFPL, but the math is quite dense and it will make a lot more sense after we've finished later sections. We'll circle back and cover it in greater depth then, but for now we'll just pick up what we need and forge ahead to the less intimidating sections. ^_^

September 11th

• Introductions, logistics, scheduling, motivation, &c.
• Chapter 1.1. The idea here is that programs (code) are really tree-shaped; in the next section we'll develop techniques to reason about tree-shaped objects. Don't worry if you don't understand everything yet!

For the next week, we'll probably skip into chapter 2 and maybe a bit of 4 rather than get bogged down in the finer points of binding and substitution ...