Advanced Programming (AP)

At course completion, the successful student will have:

Knowledge of

• Higher-level program structuring patterns for separating concerns.
• The basics of message-passing concurrency, and of how concurrent programming can be used for parallel programming.
• Program structuring principles and design patterns for dealing with software errors.
• Property-based testing of functions and stateful APIs

Skills to

• Use program structuring principles and design patterns, such as monads, to structure the code so that there is a clear separation of concerns.
• Use a parser combinator library to write a parser for a medium-sized language with a given grammar, including changing the grammar so that it is on an appropriate form.
• Implement simple concurrent/distributed servers using message passing, with appropriate use of synchronous and asynchronous message passing.
• Use program structuring principles and design patterns for making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors.
• Construct systematic test suites for programs and modules, including property-based tests where relevant.

Competences to

• Quickly acquaint themselves with advanced programming techniques, from academic literature and/or technical documentation.
• Use those techniques to solve challenging, realistic problems.
• Write correct, efficient, and maintainable programs with clear separation of concerns.
• Give an assessment of their own code, based on a systematic evaluation of correctness, selection of algorithms and data structures, error scenarios, and elegance.