[Caml-list] ANN: registrations open for the OCaml MOOC! (with subtitles, and a broader call)

[Caml-list] ANN: registrations open for the OCaml MOOC! (with subtitles, and a broader call)

[Roberto Di Cosmo]

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We announced the opening of the registrations for the OCaml Mooc a little
more than a week ago, and we got several great suggestions on how to
improve the communication around this course.

As a first point, we forgot to mention that the course is indeed in
English, but subtitles are available, both in English and French (thanks to
a great many volunteers, with special thanks to Jean-Francois Monin that
took care of the french version entirely by himself!)

As a second remark, we need to reach out to a wider public that does not
know much of functional programming or OCaml, while the text of the
previous announcement was more oriented to our own community.

You will find here below an announcement text specifically designed for a
broader community (with many thanks to Julia Lawall for her help!)

Feel free to forward wherever you may see fit: let's not be shy, future
functional programmers may hide in unexpected places!

--
Roberto Di Cosmo, Yann Regis-Gianas, Ralf Treinen, with Benjamin Canou and
Gregoire Henry


Learn functional programming with the OCaml programming language:
registrations are open!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Functional programming is attracting interest from a broad range of
developers because it allows to write expressive, concise and elegant
programs.

The course "Introduction to Functional programming using the OCaml
language" introduces gradually the central notions of functional
programming, via a set of video courses that are complemented by a rich set
of interesting exercises that you can perform fully in your browser... Yes,
this means you can start learning functional programming without any
hassle: nothing to install, nothing to tune up: the programming environment
is just one click away!

During the course, you will discover powerful mechanisms that allow to
build and manipulate complex data structures in a clean and efficient way.
And you will see how functions play a central role, as first-class values
that can be freely used in any place where an expression can appear.

Registrations are already open at

  https://www.fun-mooc.fr/courses/parisdiderot/56002S02/session02/about

The course will start on September 26th 2016, and will run for six weeks.

Your expected effort is between 2 and 6 hours per week, depending on your
background, including the time spent watching the the short video sequences
of the course, that total approximately an hour per week.

This may seem a significant effort, but at the end of the course you will
have actually learned a lot: the final programming project will confirm
that you acquired a good mastery of functional programming and the ability
to develop medium sized programs with ease.

Thousands of learners attended the first run of this course that ended in
January 2016, and the many that completed it were extremely satisfied.

To introduce you to functional programming, we have chosen to use the
OCaml programming language. OCaml is a rich, elegant, efficient programming
language that reconciles the conciseness and flexibility of untyped
programming languages (like Python, for example) with the safety of
strongly typed programming languages (like Java, for example), and that has
a vibrant user community.

Facebook, Microsoft, JaneStreet, Bloomberg are some big names in industry
that adopted OCaml to develop cutting edge applications.  The research
community uses OCaml for writing tools like the proof assistant Coq, the
Coccinelle program transformer, the Frama-C code analyser, or the Astree
static analyser.  Several start ups use OCaml to obtain tenfold gains in
productivity and stability of their code base.

Once you have started mastering functional programming using OCaml, we are
sure that other programming languages will never look the same to you
again.

This course will be held in English, but subtitles are already available
both in English and in French.

Prerequisites
-------------

To take full advantage of this course you should have already some basic
knowledge of computer programming, in particular you should already know
how to write simple computer programs in some programming language. For
instance, you should know concepts like variables (or identifiers),
functions (or procedures, methods), conditionals, and loops.

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