In order to get the most benefit from the course, it is necessary to install some software in advance
The languages that will be covered in the course are Scala, Haskell, JAX and Dex. Ideally, you will install all of these on your laptop in advance of the course. However, it is not necessary to install/use all of these languages for the course to be useful. Installing, say, Scala and at least one other (depending on your interests), will be fine.
In addition to installing some software, you should also download a copy of this repo the day before the course.
The easiest way to install all necessary Scala tools on your system is by using a tool called Coursier. See the getting started instructions on the Scala website for how to install this. Once you have Coursier installed, doing cs setup should install everything else that you need, including sbt, which is the main tool we will be relying on for this course.
Scala editing modes are available for most programmer code editing tools (including Emacs and Vim). If you want a full-featured IDE, then IntelliJ Idea is typically recommended. The free community edition is fine. Be sure to install the Scala plugin for IntelliJ during the installation process.
The Haskell website has information on installing various components of the Haskell toolchain. But if you are running Linux, you can easily install everything you need via your package manager. eg. on Ubuntu, just installing the packages haskell-platform and haskell-stack will provide everything you need for this course. The packages have similar names on other distros.
JAX is a library for Python which can be installed with pip. You first need to make sure that you have python and pip installed on your system. Then see the installation instructions which are a bit system dependent. The CPU-only version of JAX is fine for this course. Note that if you know about Python "virtual environments", it might be better to install JAX in a new environment.
Dex is an experimental new language (written in Haskell) which currently needs to be built from source. This is relatively straightforward on Macs and most Linux distros, but is likely to be impractical on Windows.
If you know git, clone the Dex repo, and if not, click on the green "Code" button, and download the repo as a zip file, and uncompress on your system. Then follow the Installing instructions. Note that I have some additional installation instructions for Ubuntu and Fedora which will probably be useful for anyone using those distros (and the Ubuntu instructions are probably useful for any Debian-derived distro).