[Haskell-beginners] Need some advices about university

[Rustom Mody]

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 11:15 AM, Noah Diewald <noah at diewald.me> wrote:

> On 10/27/2011 09:31 PM, Rustom Mody wrote:
> > On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 1:19 AM, Noah Diewald <noah at diewald.me
> > <mailto:noah at diewald.me>> wrote:
> >
> >     It would be nice to know of a school somewhere in the US or Canada
> where
> >     CS courses aren't taught mostly in Java. Is there such a place?
> >
> >     I would love to find a school with strengths in FP and linguistics.
> >
> >
> > It seems you want to search for an intersection of linguistics + FP.
> > There is nltk http://www.nltk.org/.  Its in python -- hopefully better
> > than java though not haskell.
>
> Thanks. I appreciate the help. I was aware of nltk. I know about GF,
> too. I guess functional programming is the important bit for me.


About 20 years ago the FP scene was roughly: typed FPLs in Europe (ML,
Miranda etc) and scheme in the US.  If I remember right MIT, Yale, Indiana
and Rice were all strong scheme departments. And of course there would be
more second tier univs following-the-leader. The scene today seems to have
changed -- MIT is into java http://www.cs101.org/. Stanford has switched to
javascript:
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/07/11/183246/stanford-cs101-adopts-javascript!!

My general suggestion is to generalize from haskell to the paradigm: so ML,
F#, scheme, python are in different respects better approximations to
haskell than java



> It
> bothers me that all schools seem to be Java schools in the US but I
> guess I do actually want something more specific than anything but Java.
> Java is just the bad guy since it seems to be the only option so often.
> I kind of regret going on about it so much in my last email. It is
> better to focus on the positives.
>
> I like linguistics and I like functional programming. Something like
> this is right up my alley:
>
> Computational Semantics with Functional Programming by Jan van Eijck and
> Christina Unger.
> http://homepages.cwi.nl/~jve/cs/
>
> I really like the idea of eventually being able to model natural
> language grammars using Haskell but for theoretical and descriptive work
> not just to process it. I hear that there are HPSG researchers in the US
> using systems written in Lisp, which sounds cool but is pretty rare and
> hard to find. I guess my dream school would have a good theoretical
> linguistics department and a good CS department with a big functional
> programming focus. I still need to learn a lot about CS, not just
> particular techniques that relate to language. Where I am applying now
> has a great linguistics department and a great CS department but I know
> that the courses I take in CS will be Java courses. It isn't really what
> I want but I've accepted that I'll just have to learn what I can on my
> own, which isn't so bad but having teachers and fellow students with
> similar interests around would be a lot nicer.
>
> And, I thank you for your help but I really am mostly curious about US
> universities with lots of FP goodies more than any particular software.
> My question is the same as the person who started this thread's. Where
> do you go in the US if you love functional programming and particularly
> Haskell? I would love some advice about universities. Google really
> doesn't know everything.
>
>
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