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From Theory to Systems: A Grounded Approach to Programming Language Education

Author Will Crichton

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Author Details

Will Crichton
  • Stanford University, CA, USA

Acknowledgements

I am eternally grateful to my advisor, Pat Hanrahan, for his support and feedback through the years. His positivity, encouragement, and wisdom continue to push me and this course to ever greater heights.

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Will Crichton. From Theory to Systems: A Grounded Approach to Programming Language Education. In 3rd Summit on Advances in Programming Languages (SNAPL 2019). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 136, pp. 4:1-4:9, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2019) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.SNAPL.2019.4

Abstract

I present a new approach to teaching a graduate-level programming languages course focused on using systems programming ideas and languages like WebAssembly and Rust to motivate PL theory. Drawing on students' prior experience with low-level languages, the course shows how type systems and PL theory are used to avoid tricky real-world errors that students encounter in practice. I reflect on the curricular design and lessons learned from two years of teaching at Stanford, showing that integrating systems ideas can provide students a more grounded and enjoyable education in programming languages. The curriculum, course notes, and assignments are freely available: http://cs242.stanford.edu/f18/

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Social and professional topics → Computing education
Keywords
  • programming languages
  • programming language education

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References

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