Plans for Programming Languages 1 (Com S 541), Fall 1999

This coming semester, Fall 1999, I plan to organize the course around the idea of how language designers can ``make programming easier.'' My plan is to have you think about:

• What makes programming hard.
• How we could identify a subset of programming skills that can be easily taught to people who don't want to become expert programmers.
• How we (as language designers) can provide tools to the expert programmers so that they can provide what is necessary for non-expert programmers do do their work.

I think this will lead us into domain specific languages, executable specifications, software reuse, and perhaps object-oriented (OO) frameworks, etc. That in turn will lead us to investigate functional programming languages, logic programming languages, component-based software, and OO languages and extensions.

We will jointly work out the consequences of these ideas as we go along in the course.