Re: [Haskell-beginners] Need some advices about university

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 11:15 AM, Noah Diewald wrote:

On 10/27/2011 09:31 PM, Rustom Mody wrote:

...

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 1:19 AM, Noah Diewald mailto:noah@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-j... 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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