I'll keep this brief:

I'm taking Comp Sci 1MA3 in the coming semester because it was recommended for future studies in Psych Neuroscience and Behaviour. Telling a program to sort data or do whatever is apparently a useful skill.

However, the course changed form an imperative langue (python) to a purely functional language (haskell).

Do you think I will learn anything with haskell that will help me in graduate work and beyond? I have never programmed before so I do not know the differences in the type of languages and can't tell if going from imperative to functional will have more/less benefit for me in PNB... Aka I dont know if Comp Sci 1MA3 would even be recommended now that it is a different language.


Thanks for your time.

Functional languages are harder to understand than normal imperative ones, so it may take you a while to figure out.

Understanding how to use functional languages, however, is a really good thing to know if you want to do graduate work. The syntax/style is much closer to formal discrete mathematics used in computer science, so a lot of what you read in research papers will be almost directly portable to a functional program.

Outside of graduate studies and research though... they're not used so much.

Regardless, I think that's a really smart decision on their part to switch to Haskell from Python. Even though you may not use functional languages in work really, it will make you a better programmer in any paradigm. This is because in functional programming, if your program isn't pretty much exactly correct - it simply won't do anything. Imperative programs tend to let you get away with a lot of things .

Thanks, I suppose the problem is that my lack of experience in both psych research and programming makes it hard to see what kind of transferable skills I can get. I won't be reading any comp-sci papers in the future and that is for sure.

Can anyone chime in on the usefulness of Math 1B03 (Linear Algebra I) to a PNB major? The undergrad calendar states that it is "strongly recommended" for us, but I don't really see the relevance.

Originally Posted by _Mike

Can anyone chime in on the usefulness of Math 1B03 (Linear Algebra I) to a PNB major? The undergrad calendar states that it is "strongly recommended" for us, but I don't really see the relevance.

Graphs and data? I can see a lot of usefulness if you're going to be dealing with research papers (and research of your own) but it might also be there to make you a little more rounded of a pnb