Comp Sci 61A - Online lectures

This week, I am starting to follow one series of the online UC Berkeley lectures. The lectures are by Brian Harvey's CS 61A from the spring of 2008. As is always the case, following a lecture without trying to do it yourself is not going to get you far.

In the first two months of the class, Prof. Harvey is examining functional programming with LISP. To follow along, I am using Clojure. Installing on OSX amounts to 'sudo port install clojure'. The clojure command line is accessed by the clj command. As noted in the lecture, it is easy to write interpreters. The class uses scheme, so I need a scheme interpreter for clojure.

In order to describe the foundations of computer programming, Prof. Harvey wrote the following during his second lecture:

Physical foundation of computer science

Topic	studied in...
Application Program	CS 61A
High level language (Scheme)	CS 61B
Low Level Langauge (C)	CS 61C
Machine Langauge/architecture	...
circuit elements	EE
transistors	applied physics
solid state physics	Physics
Quantum Mechanics	Physics

This ties in rather naturally with the OSI Seven Layer Model.

This class is presenting a 'real world' view of computer science, not computer science as applied mathematics. As with the physical sciences and engineering, mathematics is the language, not the subject in CS. This is not meant to be a put down of math.

In the first lecture, he gave a concise explanation of 'function' vs. 'procedure'. I am going to enjoy these lectures...