Luca Saiu - Teaching - DEVL (Développement de logiciel libre) - 2008

DEVL is a course introducing the philosophy and practice of free software taught by me at Institut Galilée, Université Paris Nord. The course is mostly in English.

News

• 2009-02-24: The rattrapage project is ready.
  Please notice that I will not accept group projects for the rattrapage session. You will have to work alone.
• 2009-01-07: Added the written exam solution.
• 2008-11-09: Added exam modalities. There is no difference with everything I've always said, of course: it's just a more formal statement of what I have already promised in advance.
• 2008-10-11: I've just added some links to resources in French.
• 2008-10-06: the final project page is available (the original project is now expired: you'll have to work (alone!) on the rattrapage project).

Material

You can access slides and other course material from last year's course page. Just note that this year the exam rules are different, and the final project (the original project is now expired: you'll have to work (alone!) on the rattrapage project) is also completely new.

This year I didn't use my slides in class, but I still mostly followed them; they can be good for a quick review.
If you are interested and you want more information you can find online material here. You will need to study from there if you didn't come to class; I think the exam will be a little more difficult in that case, so if you study by yourself and have any question you're particularly encouraged to write to the mailing list, or to me personally.

If you have problems with Unix you can also look here.

The unofficial course mailing list

I strongly suggest students to subscribe to the (unofficial) course mailing list.

Project

Everything is explained in the project page (the original project is now expired: you'll have to work (alone!) on the rattrapage project).

Handouts

Sometimes I distribute some material on paper, to be used in class or at the lab:

• FEEDBACK: a survey to better organize the course next year. If you were not in class on 2008-11-04 but you want to participate you can send me your answers: you can use an anonymous re-mailer or an anonymous e-mail account.
• RATTRAPAGE. This is last year's rattrapage written exam, which we have examined in class as an exercise. You can find another example, with commented solutions, on the DEVL 2007 page.
• A GNU Emacs Reference Card
• The X11 License
• The GNU General Public License, version 3

If you have problems with English

Here are some links to resources in French.

Written exam

• 0 points for not answering
• +1 point for a correct answer
• -1 point for a wrong answer

Final mark

This is how your final mark will be computed. It's just a more formal way of stating what I've always said in class: what I have promised doesn't change.

Let's define the sum with saturation _⊕_ as a function of two parameters, p and w:

If p is your project mark (the sum of all your project bonuses, or 0 if you submitted nothing) and w is your written mark (0 if you were not present at the written exam), then your final mark will be p⊕w.

Note that p∊(ℚ⁺∪{0}) (I may give fractional project bonuses, but no maluses) and w∊ℤ (the written mark is integer, possibly zero or negative), hence (p⊕w)∊(ℚ⁺∪{0}). If your final mark is fractional, I will bring it as it is to the jury, where it will be rounded by excess or by defect.

I think these rules to be very generous: my purpose is only to incite you to spend time thinking about the topics we've covered in the course, and to make you learn some programming. I have no interest in giving you a bad mark.

Again, if you don't come to class and have any question you are particularly encouraged to use the mailing list or write to me personally.

Free software philosophy and history

• The GNU Project web site.
• Free Software, Free Society: the selected essays of Richard M. Stallman.
• Philosophy of the GNU Project. A large collection of articles about the free software movement.

Open Source

• The Open Source Initiative web site.
• A collection of papers by Eric Raymond.

• The Lisp Wikipedia article. This deals with the whole family of languages, which includes Scheme.
• The Scheme Wikipedia article.
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs ("SICP"), by Abelson and Sussman (the full text is online). This is a very beautiful textbook about languages and programming, which also uses and teaches Scheme. Some parts may look simple for Master students, but despite being easy to read this text is surprisingly deep.
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - video lectures: complete videos of a full course of twenty lectures given by Abelson and Sussman in 1986, teaching languages, how to write programs, and also Scheme in the process. Enlightening and entertaining.
• Teach yourself Scheme in fixnum days is a good Scheme tutorial. I recommend this to students whose interest was captured by my explaination and now want to have a better practical knowledge of the language. It doesn't need a big effort.
• Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine (Part I), John McCarthy, 1960 (!). The original article on Lisp, with the original notation. An absolute must-read for anyone interested in languages.
• Transcript of Richard Stallman's speech at the 2002 International Lisp Conference: about the early Lisp Machines history.
• If you like Scheme you will surely be interested in the original Lambda Papers (1975-1980) by Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman. They're deep but written in an informal style, quite a pleasure to read.

Extension languages

• The GNU Guile home page also deals with the general idea of extension languages.
• This old article by Stallman (1981) contains some historical curiosities on Emacs and discusses the idea of an extensible program at length.

Emacs

• The GNU Emacs home page also contains a web tutorial which can be useful for starting to use Emacs.
• The GNU Emacs manual is very complete and well-written.
• Emacs features are mostly implemented in Emacs Lisp, a Lisp dialect different from the one I've shown in the course, but however easy to learn. The GNU Emacs Lisp reference manual is its complete documentation, but I suggest to start from An introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp, by Bob Chassel.

X

• The X Window System Wikipedia article is very good, and contains other pointers.

GCC

• The GCC home page is a good starting point for understanding GCC. GCC internals are extremely complex, but you can try.

Copyright and licenses

• What copyleft is, from the GNU web site. This is particularly important: it's the idea at the base of the GPL and LGPL licenses.
• The Copyright Wikipedia article
• The French copyright law Wikipedia article is very good; unfortunately, and curiously, it seems to be only available in English.
• Comments on many popular free software and non free software licenses.

Development methodologies

• The famous series of articles about worse is better by Richard Gabriel.
• Paul Graham is another fine essayist who has plenty of interesting things to say about programming. I recommend his Revenge of the Nerds to language freaks like me.

Hacker culture

• The Jargon File, edited by Eric Raymond (hence not written from a free software perspective).
  I particularly recommend Appendix A: The story of Mel (here are some annotations which may be helpful for inexperienced readers).
• Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (ISBN 0-385-19195-2), by Stephen Levy, 1984, Anchor Press/Doubleday. I don't know whether a French translation exists.

Back to my home page...