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Teaching Programming Languages by Experimental and Adversarial Thinking

Authors Justin Pombrio, Shriram Krishnamurthi, Kathi Fisler

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Keywords
  • mystery languages
  • interpreters
  • paradigms
  • education

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Abstract

We present a new approach to teaching programming language courses. Its essence is to view programming language learning as a natural science activity, where students probe languages experimentally to understand both the normal and extreme behaviors of their features. This has natural parallels to the "security mindset" of computer security, with languages taking the place of servers and other systems. The approach is modular (with minimal dependencies), incremental (it can be introduced slowly into existing classes), interoperable (it does not need to push out other, existing methods), and complementary (since it introduces a new mode of thinking).

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Justin Pombrio, Shriram Krishnamurthi, and Kathi Fisler. Teaching Programming Languages by Experimental and Adversarial Thinking. In 2nd Summit on Advances in Programming Languages (SNAPL 2017). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 71, pp. 13:1-13:9, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2017) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.SNAPL.2017.13

Author Details

Justin Pombrio
Shriram Krishnamurthi
Kathi Fisler

References

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  7. Shriram Krishnamurthi. Teaching programming languages in a post-Linnaean age. In SIGPLAN Workshop on Undergraduate Programming Language Curricula, 2008. Position paper. Google Scholar
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  9. Robert Sebesta. Concepts of Programming Languages. Addison-Wesley, fifth edition. Google Scholar
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