Re: [Caml-list] teaching OCaml

[John Whitington <john@coherentgraphics.co.uk>]

Hi,

Robert Muller wrote:
> Thank you John. I will look at your graphics library, much appreciated.
> I didn't require it this first time through but many of my students
> bought your book:
>
> http://www.cs.bc.edu/~muller/teaching/cs110105/f14/lib/html/textbooks.html
>
> They tell me it is very helpful.
>
> To me, what is needed to get ML-in-101 off the ground is simplicity:
>
> 1. a simple implementation/IDE that is trivial to install and "just
> works" on macs, Windows (and linux, I suppose), I am thinking of
> something like the experience I had in the past with Dr. Java.
> 2. a simple, no fuss library for graphics, animation and audio something
> like Sedgewick & Wayne's stdlib (http://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/code/)
> 3. decent error messages for both syntax errors and type errors.
>
> Ideally, I would prefer that both the IDE and the graphics/audio were
> hosted in a brower
> much like in Elm (http://elm-lang.org/).

Have you seen this? I've not used it but I believe it's related:

https://github.com/andrewray/iocaml

> I am only dimly aware of other universities teaching ML. I know that
> some folks in Denmark are using F#. Do you know if any schools in Europe
> are using OCaml in intro courses?

Here's a list, to which you can add yourself:

http://ocaml.org/learn/teaching-ocaml.html

We teach Standard ML at Cambridge, so we have even fewer tools :-) But
then we don't do anything graphical. Our first years do ML & Java, so
they get plenty of graphical / GUI work with Java.

Here's what our ML course looks like (and, basically, has done since 1994):

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1415/FoundsCS/fcs-notes.pdf

-- 
John Whitington
Director, Coherent Graphics Ltd
http://www.coherentpdf.com/