Introduction
- Rationale
- Theory Structure
- How to Use the Course
- References
- Theory
- Practice
- Additional
Computational Process Organization
Course Notes
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About
About the Book
What these notes are about. Programming as the organization of a computational process — the machinery beyond any specific programming language.
Over 10 years of teaching this material, I’ve watched students pass through three mindsets. First: each programming language is its own unique world. Then: languages are basically interchangeable. Finally — once they step outside the defaults of any single one — they see that languages really are different, but in ways the surface rarely reveals. This course and its notes aim to bring readers to that third view as directly as possible.
I wrote the first version of these notes in 2020 for teaching at Hangzhou Dianzi University (HDU) in China and at ITMO University. The 2026 edition is a polished version of those notes and it is a step toward future books on this topic, which will also bring in new material from my Computer Architecture and Functional Programming courses.
How it’s organized. Three parts, each answering a different question:
- Computer and Process as a Whole — what is a system? Systems engineering, life cycles, OMG Essence, quality, and verification.
- Basic Computational Process Description — how does computation actually happen? Models of computation; imperative machines from Turing through von Neumann to modern OS/VM stacks; declarative computing, starting from lambda calculus.
- Computational Process Management — how do we shape and control it? Reusable objects, polymorphism, higher-order functions, evaluation strategies, metaprogramming, concurrency, and distributed systems — across many languages, so the ideas outlive the tools.
Who it’s for. Students taking a course on the foundations of programming — at ITMO we call it Computational Process Organization — and practicing engineers who want a sharper mental model of the abstractions they already use every day.
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Author
About the Author
Aleksandr Penskoi
I'm an Associate Professor at ITMO University and also work in industry at Health Samurai. My Ph.D. is in computer systems architecture: I studied multi-level computer systems and how their levels interact through configuration, compilation, and interpretation.
For over ten years I've taught computer architecture, functional programming, systems engineering, and the course these notes come from, in Russia, China, and India. I first wrote the notes in 2020 for students at ITMO University and Hangzhou Dianzi University.
Outside the classroom, I build tools: NITTA, a CAD platform for hard-real-time application-specific processors, and Wrench, a CPU simulator and auto-grading toolkit for teaching computer architecture.
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