This class was focused on learning Prolog and Haskell and the differences between functional and logic programming. While it was initially difficult to wrap my head around the new "backwards" way of coding for Prolog and Haskell, it ended up be a really rewarding experience and opened my eyes up to how much more efficient and powerful functional programming can be. In my opinion, they are excellent if you want to code something quickly and safely, but unfortunately I don't believe they will ever become mainstream due to the difficulty it takes to read and understand the code, and the lack of libraries and support for the languages.

The first project was to calculate the value of a hand, and select which card should be removed for the most optimal results, in Cribbage, an English card game. This was done entirely in Prolog, and whilst it was difficult as my first introduction to functional programming it was fun and satisfying to work through. You can find the project here.

The second project, in Haskell now, really had me scratching my head for a while. Surprisingly this was not due to its complexity, but due to how difficult it was to make the program more efficient. The task was finding all valid haikus given a list of words, with all the syllable and word handling already done for us. In fact, I thought I completed this project in only a few hours, but then when I tried the more complex test cases it was taking exponentially longer and longer to run.

I must have ended up rewriting this program about 20 times over before I finally found a method that I was satisfied with. The main difficulty was finding where the inefficiencies were actually coming from, as Haskell doesn't have the same debugging tools as other languages, and I had to rely on print statements and my own intuition to find the problem. I ended up realising that I needed to incrementally build up the haikus and delete words from the dictionary after I was done finding all variations of them, rather than trying to find all haikus and causing a lot of redundant work. This was a great learning experience for me, and I'm glad I was able to work through it and find a solution that I was happy with. You can find the project here.