[Caml-list] Fourth edition of the OCaml MOOC

[Caml-list] Fourth edition of the OCaml MOOC

[Yann Régis-Gianas]

Dear OCaml hackers and enthusiasts,

the fourth edition of the OCaml MOOC will start in September.  Please,
take a minute to spread the word around you!

Three possible actions:

1. Convince everyone you know to register at

                   https://tinyurl.com/ocamooc4

2. Print, post and share our flyer

                      https://bit.ly/2YrSVLF

3. Post the announcement message which is pasted at the end of this email.

By the way, we would like to thank the sponsors of the OCaml Software
Foundation for their support. Without it, the OCaml MOOC would not
exist.

Thank you all for your help!

Roberto Di Cosmo, Yann Régis-Gianas and Ralf Treinen.

## 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/course-v1:parisdiderot+56002+session04/about

The course will start on September 22th 2019, 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 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 two runs of this course in
2015, 2016 and 2018, 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.

Docker, 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. Recently, Tezos, one of the most innovative blockchains, has
developed its entire software stack using OCaml to get high insurance
about the execution of smart contracts.

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 in English, in Portuguese 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.