This book is based on the Author’s experience of teaching programming to students in the University of Cambridge supervisions system. In particular, working with students for the first-year undergraduate course “Foundations of Computer Science”, based on Standard ML and lectured for many years by Lawrence C. Paulson.
An interesting aspect of supervising students from a wide range of backgrounds (some with no previous experience at all taking Computer Science as an additional subject within the Cambridge Natural Sciences curriculum, and some with a great deal of programming experience already) is the level playing field which the ML family of languages (like OCaml) provide. Sometimes, those students with least prior programming experience perform the best.
I have tried to write a book which has no prerequisites – and with which any intelligent undergraduate ought to be able to cope, whilst trying to be concise enough that someone coming from another language might not be too annoyed by the tone.
When I was a boy, our class was using a word processor for the first time. I wanted a title for my story, so I typed it on the first line and then, placing the cursor at the beginning, held down the space bar until the title was roughly in the middle. My friend taught me how to use the centring function, but it seemed more complicated to me, and I stuck with the familiar way – after all, it worked. Later on, of course, when I had more confidence and experience, I realized he had been right.
When starting a language which is fundamentally different from those you have seen before, it can be difficult to see the advantages, and to try to think of every concept in terms of the old language. I would urge you to consider the possibility that, at the moment, you might be the boy holding down the space bar.
Inevitably, the approach here owes a debt to that taken by Lawrence C. Paulson, both in his lecture notes and in his book “ML for the Working Programmer” (Cambridge University Press, 1996). Question 3 in Chapter 11 is inspired by an examination question of his. I was taught Standard ML by Professor Paulson and Andrei Serjantov in Autumn 2000. Mark Shinwell has been a constant source of helpful discussion. Robin Walker and latterly Andrew Rice have arranged the supervisions system at Queens’ College within which I have taught since 2004. I am grateful to the developers of OCaml who have provided such a pleasant environment in which to write programs. Helpful comments on an earlier draft were provided by Martin DeMello, Damien Doligez, Arthur Guillon, Zhi Han, Robert Jakob, Xavier Leroy, Florent Monnier, and Benjamin Pierce. And, of course, I thank all my students, some of whom are now working with OCaml for a living.