Postscript

Congratulations: You've made it to the end!

Looking Back...

We've covered a lot of ground. The topics might be summarized like this:
  • Functional programming:
    • "declarative" programming style (recursion over persistent data structures, rather than looping over mutable arrays or pointer structures)
    • higher-order functions
    • polymorphism
  • Logic, the mathematical basis for software engineering:
                   logic                        calculus
            --------------------   =   ----------------------------
            software engineering       mechanical/civil engineering
    
    • inductively defined sets and relations
    • inductive proofs
    • proof objects
  • Coq, an industrial-strength proof assistant
    • functional core language
    • core tactics
    • automation
  • Foundations of programming languages
    • notations and definitional techniques for precisely specifying
      • abstract syntax
      • operational semantics
        • big-step style
        • small-step style
      • type systems
    • program equivalence
    • Hoare logic
    • fundamental metatheory of type systems
      • progress and preservation
    • theory of subtyping

Looking Forward...

Some good places to go for more...
  • This book includes several optional chapters covering topics that you may find useful. If you've been using it in the context of a course, take a look at the table of contents and the chapter dependency diagram.
  • Cutting-edge conferences on programming languages and formal verification:
    • POPL
    • PLDI
    • OOPSLA
    • ICFP
    • CAV
    • (and many others)
  • More on functional programming
    • Learn You a Haskell for Great Good, by Miran Lipovaca [Lipovaca 2011].
    • and many other texts on Haskell, OCaml, Scheme, Scala, ...
  • More on Hoare logic and program verification
    • The Formal Semantics of Programming Languages: An Introduction, by Glynn Winskel [Winskel 1993].
    • Many practical verification tools, e.g. Microsoft's Boogie system, Java Extended Static Checking, etc.
  • More on the foundations of programming languages:
    • Types and Programming Languages, by Benjamin C. Pierce [Pierce 2002].
    • Practical Foundations for Programming Languages, by Robert Harper [Harper 2016].
    • Foundations for Programming Languages, by John C. Mitchell [Mitchell 1996].
  • More on Coq:
    • Certified Programming with Dependent Types, by Adam Chlipala [Chlipala 2013].
    • Interactive Theorem Proving and Program Development: Coq'Art: The Calculus of Inductive Constructions, by Yves Bertot and Pierre Casteran [Bertot 2004].
    • Iron Lambda (http://iron.ouroborus.net/) is a collection of ​Coq formalisations for functional languages of increasing complexity. It fills part of the gap between the end of the​ Software Foundations course and what appears in current research papers. The collection has at least Progress and Preservation theorems for a number of variants of STLC and the polymorphic lambda-calculus (System F).

(* $Date: 2016-05-26 17:51:14 -0400 (Thu, 26 May 2016) $ *)