SIGPLAN

As research in programming language design,implementation,and application advances,we must regu- larly revisit the undergraduate curriculum to ensure course content advances similarly.However,no matter how diligent our efforts,the undergraduate ...

Liberal arts curricula emphasize breadth of a student's educational experience, critical reasoning, and intellectual discourse to a greater degree than pre-professional training or engineering programs. This substantially impacts how the topic of ...

While the programming languages course played a key role in Curricula '68, '78, and '91, Curriculum 2001 replaced most of the content in programming languages with sections on learning to program. We argue that the need for a programming languages ...

This paper discusses several problems in teaching programming languages. A language tends to indoctrinate its users and desensitize us to its problems and limitations. In addition, many language issues don't arise until programs reach a certain scale, ...

The question is not whether a computing curriculum should include a rigorous course on programming languages, but which topics make up the minimum that we wish every student to understand, and how we should teach these topics.

Over the course of their careers, students will need to master a number of diverse programming languages because different languages are best suited to different tasks and because the set of "popular" languages evolves over time. In addition, sometimes ...

This position paper describes an honors introductory Computer Science course focused on designing and implementing domain-specific programming languages. The course presents programming language design as a fundamental tool for software engineering. ...

For several decades universities have taught programming languages as a fundamental part of their un-dergraduate curriculum. These courses cover the core topics used in the design of good programming languages. However, widely used commercial languages ...

Programming language "paradigms" are a moribund and tedious legacy of a bygone age. Modern language designers pay them no respect, so why do our courses slavishly adhere to them? This paper argues that we should abandon this method of teaching languages,...

Programs encounter increasingly complex and fragile mappings to computing platforms, resulting in performance characteristics that are often mysterious to students, practitioners, and even researchers. We discuss some steps toward an experimental ...

Undergraduate computer science students typically have only a limited understanding of their favorite languages and no inkling of other programming paradigms. Yet modern programmers typically work with several languages, and the availability of cheap ...

Individual department goals drive undergraduate computer science educators to teach with varying priorities on preparing students for continuing to graduate school or embarking on a career that leverages their education immediately after college. ...

Programming languages as a required course is disappearing from undergraduate computer science programs. This is not surprising given that the course often proves to be challenging for faculty to teach and unpopular among students. The author argues ...

It is argued that the teaching of programming is central to the education of skilled computer professionals, that the teaching of programming languages is central to the teaching of programming. that these topics must include the specification, ...

This note describes and motivates our current plans for an undergraduate course on programming language concepts for software development students. We describe the competences we expect students to acquire as well as the topics covered by the course. We ...

Three key forces are shaping the modern Computer Science (CS) curriculum: (1) new topics/courses are squeezing out existing ones; (2) a focus on "big picture" and interdisciplinary aspects of CS is leading to curricula in which the traditional core ...

In this white paper, we propose a list of essential concepts of programming languages, and discuss the techniques we have used to teach these concepts.