Functional Programming Foundations

This unit introduces core concepts of the functional programming paradigm using Haskell and Python, including the historical roots in lambda calculus and contrasts with procedural approaches. Students will set up development environments, learn basic data representations and I/O, manipulate lists and recursive functions, apply regular expressions and simple data tools, and practice debugging to prepare for applied functional programming in later units.

Learning Objectives

• Analyze the functional programming paradigm by comparing declarations and procedures, tracing the origins of lambda calculus, and contrasting functional approaches with other programming paradigms
• Demonstrate installation and configuration of development tools (Anaconda/Python and Haskell), and execute basic programs in both environments to verify setup
• Apply functional programming fundamentals to create and manipulate data: define and operate on lists, perform slicing and recursion, use pattern matching and types, and employ regular expressions and basic data tools (e.g., Gensim) on standard datasets
• Evaluate and debug Python and Haskell programs by identifying common bugs, managing command-line and file I/O, and distinguishing binary versus textual data representations