Programming with GAP

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Links to the GAP lesson in this blog post have been updated to reflect the lesson moving to The Carpentries Incubator.

Software Carpentry is more than just a set of workshops and lessons. It is also a way to develop lessons, one that we have used successfully to create a lesson on Programming with GAP.

GAP is an open source system for discrete computational algebra. It provides a programming language with the same name; thousands of functions implementing various algebraic algorithms; and data libraries containing extensive collections of algebraic objects. GAP distribution includes its detailed documentation; even more materials on learning GAP and on using it in teaching a variety of courses are available on GAP homepage here.

Throughout the history of GAP, its development has been supported by a number of grants, one of these being the EPSRC project EP/M022641 “CoDiMa (CCP in the area of Computational Discrete Mathematics”. This is a community-building project centred on GAP and another open source mathematical software system, SageMath. CoDiMa activities include annual training schools in computational discrete mathematics, which are primarily intended for PhD students and researchers from UK institutions. A typical school starts with the Software Carpentry workshop covering basic concepts and tools, such as working with the command line, version control and task automation, continued with introductions to GAP and SageMath systems, and followed by the series of lectures and exercise classes on a selection of topics in computational discrete mathematics.

This naturally led to the idea of establishing a Software Carpentry lesson on programming with GAP. I started to develop it in 2015 for our first training school in Manchester. Since I have never been at any of the Software Carpentry workshops before and had not yet completed instructor training at that point (it is currently in progress), it was extremely beneficial for me to come as a helper to the first ever Software Carpentry workshop in St Andrews in June 2015, and obtain an insight into the Software Carpentry teaching methodology.

I took inspiration from the core Software Carpentry lessons, in particular from those on UNIX shell, Python and R. All of them have a central story which goes through almost every episode. For the GAP lesson, I have imagined a common situation: a research student with no prior experience of working with GAP (and perhaps little or no experience with programming at all) is facing a task to find a way in the huge library of GAP functions in order to study some research problem. Along this way, they start to work with GAP command line to explore algebraic objects interactively; then use the GAP language to write some simple scripts; then create own functions. More advanced topics such as, for example, extending GAP with new methods for existing types of objects, or even new objects, or organising your code in the form of a GAP package, are not so obvious for the beginners, and I have made an attempt to create a lesson which will show the direction in which their skills should be developing, and also to cover the importance of testing their code.

I started from picking up a research-like problem which may nicely expose all needed techniques and explain the mindset required to deal with it. A good candidate was the problem of calculating an average order of an element of the group, which once I’ve seen being used by Steve Linton to quickly demonstrate some GAP features to a general scientific audience. I have tried to expand this problem in my talk in Newcastle in May 2015 (see the blog post here), and thus the choice has been made.

The resulting lesson leads the learner along the path from working in the GAP command line and exploring algebraic objects interactively to saving the GAP code into files, creating functions and regression tests, and further to performing comprehensive search using one of the data libraries supplied with GAP, and extending the system by adding new attributes. On this path, the learner will became familiar with basic constructions of the GAP programming language; ways to find necessary information in the GAP system; and good design practices to organise GAP code into complex programs (for a more detailed lesson overview, see my blog post here).

Of course, it is not possible to cover everything in a several hours long course, but it fits really well into the week-long CoDiMa training school like this. It prepares the audience to hear about more advanced topics during the rest of the week: debugging and profiling; advanced GAP programming; GAP type system; distributed parallel calculations; examples of some algorithms and their implementations, etc. Also, staying for the whole week of the school, everyone has plenty of opportunities to ask further questions to instructors.

What next? The lesson on GAP can be seen here, and it has been published via Zenodo here. So far I am only aware that it has been taught twice (by myself) at two annual CoDiMa training schools in computational discrete mathematics. I can surely teach it myself, but is it written clearly enough to be taught by others? Is it possible for the reader to follow it for self-studying? Is there any introductory material missing, or is there an interest in having more advanced lesson(s) on some other aspects of the GAP system? If you would like to contribute to its further development, issues and pull requests to its repository on GitHub are most welcome! Also, we invite collaborators interested in developing a lesson on SageMath: please look at this repository and add a comment to this issue if you’re interested in contributing.