{"id":774,"date":"2009-07-07T13:56:36","date_gmt":"2009-07-07T20:56:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/?p=774"},"modified":"2009-07-07T13:56:36","modified_gmt":"2009-07-07T20:56:36","slug":"cmpt-383","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/2009\/07\/07\/cmpt-383\/","title":{"rendered":"CMPT 383, or &#8220;Why I Hate Ted&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As many of you know, one of the goals for my study leave has been to prepare to teach CMPT&nbsp;383, Comparative Programming Languages.  The calendar says this course is:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Various concepts and principles underlying the design and use of modern programming languages are considered in the context of procedural, object-oriented, functional and logic programming languages. Topics include data and control structuring constructs, facilities for modularity and data abstraction, polymorphism, syntax, and formal semantics.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I took a similar course in my undergrad, and I think it was really useful in helping me see the broader picture of what programming is.<\/p>\n<p>I have been thinking about the course off-and-on for more than a year.  I had been forming a pretty solid picture of what the course I teach would look like and things were going well, despite never having devoted any specific time to it or really writing anything down.<\/p>\n<p>Then I talked to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.sfu.ca\/~ted\/\">Ted<\/a>.  Ted has taught the course before, and has thought a lot about it.  His thoughts on the course differed from mine.  In particular, he opined that &#8220;logic programming is dead, so why teach it?&#8221;  (Okay, maybe that&#8217;s not a direct quote, but that&#8217;s what I heard.)  So that leaves functional programming as the only new paradigm worth talking about.<\/p>\n<p>He also convinced me that covering too many languages in the single course puts students into a situation of too many trees, not enough forest.  (That is, they get lost in syntax and don&#8217;t appreciate the core differences between languages.)<\/p>\n<p>Basically Ted did the most annoying thing in the world: he disagreed with me and he was right.<\/p>\n<p>But, there is a lot of stuff that I hadn&#8217;t considered before, but might be worth talking about:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Type_system\">Type systems<\/a>: static\/dynamic, strong\/weak, built-in data types, OO (or not), type inference, etc.<\/li>\n<li>Execution\/compilation environment: native code generation, JIT compilers, virtual machines, language translation (e.g. Alice &rarr; Java &rarr; execution), etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So, what the hell do I do with all of that?  Any ideas how to put all of that together into a coherent course that students can actually enjoy?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As many of you know, one of the goals for my study leave has been to prepare to teach CMPT&nbsp;383, Comparative Programming Languages. The calendar says this course is: Various concepts and principles underlying the design and use of modern programming languages are considered in the context of procedural, object-oriented, functional and logic programming languages. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,10,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching","category-tech","category-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=774"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":779,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774\/revisions\/779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}