Declarative Methods Prof. Jason Eisner Course # 601.432/632 - Spring 2026 Announcements | Key Links | Schedule | Recitations | Old Materials

Announcements

• 2/2/26 Homework 1 is ready for you. Due on Mon 2/16 at 2pm. Start now—it's long!
• 1/19/26 Welcome! Class starts Wednesday 1/21, 3-4pm, in Hodson 213.

Key Links

• Syllabus -- reference info about the course's staff, meetings, office hours, textbooks, goals, expectations, and policies. May be updated on occasion.
• Piazza site for discussion and announcements. Sign up, follow, and participate!
• Gradescope for submitting your homework.
• Recitations and TA office hours
• Video recordings (see policy on syllabus)

Schedule

Format: A typical unit will last two weeks. The first week will cover a particular declarative language. The second week will look at strategies used by modern solvers for that language. Your homework (assigned at the end of the first week) will ask you to program in the language, using specific solver software.

Warning: The schedule may change. Future lectures (and homeworks) may also change, especially for topics later in the course. .

• Lectures: intro, little languages, formal languages
  • What is this course about?
  • A broad view of computer languages, including "little languages."
  • Some examples of declarative languages.
  • How could you build a new language?
  • A review of formal languages and reductions.
• Readings
  • "Programming Pearls: Little Languages" by Jon Bentley (1986)
• Resources
  • Computer languages: some categories, one survey course, list of 2500 languages, timeline, humor
  • Al Aho's course and Tim Sheard's course on designing/implementing domain-specific (little) languages -- check out past student projects
  • Language Implementation Patterns: Create Your Own Domain-Specific and General Programming Languages, by Terence Parr (2010), author of ANTLR
  • Catalog of free compiler construction tools
  • Lua and Tcl - lightweight procedural base languages that you can easily extend
  • Readline - makes it pleasant for users to type commands interactively

• Lectures
  • SAT framework
  • SAT algorithms: systematic, stochastic
• Homework 1 (assigned 2/2, due 2/16)
  • Solving logic puzzles
  • Constructing dense crossword puzzles
• Readings
  • How to Convert a Formula to CNF
  • Perhaps Selman & Kautz, "Domain-Independent Extensions to GSAT"
  • Perhaps a paper on Chaff or UBCSAT
• Resources
  • SAT Live! portal site
  • Annual SAT solver competitions and conferences
  • Open-source frameworks for developing new systematic and stochastic SAT solvers
  • Paper on efficient conversion of formulas to CNF
  • Online compendium of NP-complete problems (with what's known about approximability); classic NP-completeness book by Garey & Johnson

• Lectures
  • Constraint programming framework
  • Constraint solver strategies
• Homework 2 (assigned 2/16, due 3/2)
• Readings
  AI magazine article
• Resources
  • ECLiPSe website, documentation (see also book), examples, and constraint library manual
  • more about interval arithmetic
  • gecode, an efficient and extensible constraint programming library that you can call easily from other languages (but doesn't have a little-language interface)
  • A highly-cited survey of Resource-constrained project scheduling

• Term project handout

• Lectures
  • Prolog
• Homework 3 (assigned 3/2, due 3/23)
• Readings
  • Prolog tutorial by J.R. Fisher
  • online Prolog book by Paul Brna (see especially section 12.2 on difference lists)
• Resources
  • SWI Prolog (the most popular open-source Prolog, if you want to use something other than ECLiPSe)
  • Prolog Programming in Depth, an online book by Michael A. Covington, Donald Nute, and Andr� Vellino
  • The Art of Prolog, by Richard O'Keefe, and its sequel, The Craft of Prolog
  • Prolog and Natural Language Analysis (online edition), by Fernando Pereira and Stuart Shieber—for NLP fans and the NLP-curious, a classic published in 1987 just before the statistical revolution hit NLP

• Lectures
  Soft Constraints: Exponential Models
• Readings
  • David MacKay's textbook, chapter 16 and chapter 26
  • Alternative: Chris Bishop's textbook, chapter 8

• Lectures
  • Mathematical Programming
  • Solvers for Mixed Integer Programming
• Homework 4 (assigned 4/1, due 4/15)
• Readings
• Resources
  • SCIP (download)
  • ZIMPL manual

• Lectures
  • Dynamic Programming
  • Expressing algorithms in the Dyna language
  • Program Transformation
• Homework 5 (assigned 4/15, due 4/27)
• Readings
  • Book chapter about Dyna
• Resources
  • Dyna website
  • Papers about Dyna
  • Papers using Dyna

• Term project handout
• Proposal due Mon 2/28
• Project writeup due Mon 4/27

Recitation Materials (available on Piazza)

• 02/04/2026: SAT basics

Old Materials

Here are some materials that we covered in past years but will probably omit this year.

• Lectures
  • Satisfiability modulo theories

• Lectures
  • Using binary classifiers - incomplete slides
  • Some binary classifiers and how to learn them
• Old homework
• Readings
• Resources

Department of Computer Science
The Johns Hopkins University
New Engineering Building Room 224
3400 North Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218
(410) 516-8775 (phone)
(410) 516-6134 (fax)

Last Modification $Date: 2026/01/16 21:24:05 $ (GMT)