Recently, user-centered methods have been proposed to improve the design of programming languages. In order to explore what benefits these methods might have for novice programming language designers, we taught a collection of user-centered programming language design methods to a group of eight students. We observed that natural programming and usability studies helped the students refine their language designs and identify opportunities for improvement, even in the short duration of a course project.
Lecture notes for the Comparative Studies of Programming Languages course, COMP6411, taught at the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada. These notes include a compiled book of primarily related articles from the Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, as well as Comparative Programming Languages book and other resources, including our own. The original notes were compiled by Dr. Paquet.
This document is intended as a stand-alone textbook chapter to be used for introducing some functional programming concepts into a course in which the primary teaching language is Java. For details of the approach, please see the paper "Functional programming, in the data structures course, in Java" by J. MacCormick, which appears in the Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges (2023).
Involving integrated development environments (IDEs) in introductory-level (CS1) programming courses is critical. However, it is difficult for instructors to find a suitable IDE that is beginner friendly and supports strong functionality. In this paper, we report the experience of using Visual Studio Code (VS Code) in a CS1 programming course. We describe our motivation for choosing VS Code and how we introduce it to students. We create comprehensive guidance with hierarchical indexing to help students with diverse programming backgrounds. We perform an experimental evaluation of students' pro…
We propose a bridge between functional and object-oriented programming in the first-year curriculum. Traditionally, curricula that begin with functional programming transition to a professional, usually object-oriented, language in the second course. This transition poses obstacles for students, and often results in confusing the details of development environments, syntax, and libraries with the fundamentals of OO programming that the course should focus on. Instead, we propose to begin the second course with a sequence of custom teaching languages which minimize the transition from the first…
This paper describes a blended learning implementation and experience supported with intelligent learning environments included in a learning management system (LMS) called @KU-UZEM. The blended learning model is realized as a combination of face to face education and e-learning. The intelligent learning environments consist of two applications named CTutor, ITest. In addition to standard e-learning tools, students can use CTutor to resolve C programming exercises. CTutor is a problem-solving environment, which diagnoses students' knowledge level but also gives feedbacks and tips to help them …
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…
Programming language design requires making many usability-related design decisions. However, existing HCI methods can be impractical to apply to programming languages: they have high iteration costs, programmers require significant learning time, and user performance has high variance. To address these problems, we adapted both formative and summative HCI methods to make them more suitable for programming language design. We integrated these methods into a new process, PLIERS, for designing programming languages in a user-centered way. We evaluated PLIERS by using it to design two new program…
The Second International Workshop on Trends in Functional Programming in Education, TFPIE 2013, was held on May 13, 2013 at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, USA. The goal of TFPIE is to gather researchers, professors, teachers, and all professionals interested in functional programming in education. Submissions were vetted by the TFPIE 2013 program committee using prevailing academic standards. The 2 articles in this volume were selected for publication as the result of this process. Tobin-Hochstadt and Van Horn report on their solution to the difficult transition between the first sem…
Context: In the context of exploring the art, science and engineering of programming, the question of which programming languages should be taught first has been fiercely debated since computer science teaching started in universities. Failure to grasp programming readily almost certainly implies failure to progress in computer science. Inquiry: What first programming languages are being taught? There have been regular national-scale surveys in Australia and New Zealand, with the only US survey reporting on a small subset of universities. This the first such national survey of universities in …
Massive training of developers following the growing demands of the information technology industry requires teachers to automate their repetitive tasks. For training courses on programming, it is promising to use automatic generation and automatic grading of exercises that require a student to write a program. This article discusses the general scheme for constructing a programming exercises generator and identifies two classes of exercises, the generation of which can be automated: converting notation into code and converting data formats. Several examples of programming exercise generators …
The use of functional programming languages in the first programming course at many universities is well-established and effective. Invariably, however, students must progress to study object-oriented programming. This article presents how the first steps of this transition have been successfully implemented at Seton Hall University. The developed methodology builds on the students' experience with type-based design acquired in their previous introduction to programming courses. The transition is made smooth by explicitly showing students that the design lessons they have internalized are rele…
This is a tutorial on logic programming and Prolog appropriate for a course on programming languages for students familiar with imperative programming.
At the workshop on Trends in Functional Programming in Education (TFPIE) in 2015 Ionescu and Jansson presented the approach underlying the "Domain Specific Languages of Mathematics" (DSLsofMath) course even before the first course instance. We were then encouraged to come back to present our experience and the student results. Now, three years later, we have seen three groups of learners attend the course, and the first two groups have also continued on to take challenging courses in the subsequent year. In this paper we present three examples from the course material to set the scene, and we …
This paper documents our experience using declarative languages to give secondary school students a first taste of Computer Science. The course aims to teach students a bit about programming in Prolog, but also exposes them to important Computer Science concepts, such as unification or searching strategies. Using Haskell's Snap Framework in combination with our own NanoProlog library, we have developed a web application to teach this course.
Computer programming is among the fundamental aspects of computer science curriculum. Many students first introduced to introductory computer programming courses experience difficulties in learning and comprehending. Vast amount of researches have revealed that, generally programming courses are regarded as difficult and challenging and thus often have the highest dropout rates. Moreover, numerous researches have devoted in delivering new approaches and tools in enhancing the process of teaching and learning computer programming to novice programmers. One among the tools that have emerged to o…
Worldwide, computer science departments have experienced a dramatic increase in the number of student enrolments. Moreover, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic requires institutions to radically replace the traditional way of on-site teaching, moving interaction from physical to virtual space. We report on our strategies and experience tackling these issues as part of a Haskell-based functional programming and verification course, accommodating over 2000 students in the course of two semesters. Among other things, we fostered engagement with weekly programming competitions and creative homework proj…
There is a sharp disconnect between the programming and mathematical portions of the standard undergraduate computer science curriculum, leading to student misunderstanding about how the two are related. We propose connecting the subjects early in the curriculum---specifically, in CS1 and the introductory discrete mathematics course---by using formal reasoning about programs as a bridge between them. This article reports on Haverford and Grinnell College's experience in constructing the end points of this bridge between CS1 and discrete mathematics. Haverford's long-standing "3-2-1" curriculum…
Object-oriented programming (OOP) is widely used in the software industry and university introductory courses today. Following the structure of most textbooks, such courses frequently are organised starting with the concepts of imperative and structured programming and only later introducing OOP. An alternative approach is to begin directly with OOP following the Outside-In teaching method as proposed by Meyer. Empirical results for the effects of Outside-In teaching on students and lecturers are sparse, however. We describe the conceptual design and empirical evaluation of two OOP introductor…
It is well documented, and has been the topic of much research, that Computer Science courses tend to have higher than average drop out rates at third level. This is a problem that needs to be addressed with urgency but also caution. The required number of Computer Science graduates is growing every year but the number of graduates is not meeting this demand and one way that this problem can be alleviated is to encourage students at an early age towards studying Computer Science courses. This paper presents a systematic literature review on the role of visual and textual programming languages …
This paper introduces the "Search, Align, and Repair" data-driven program repair framework to automate feedback generation for introductory programming exercises. Distinct from existing techniques, our goal is to develop an efficient, fully automated, and problem-agnostic technique for large or MOOC-scale introductory programming courses. We leverage the large amount of available student submissions in such settings and develop new algorithms for identifying similar programs, aligning correct and incorrect programs, and repairing incorrect programs by finding minimal fixes. We have implemented…
An introductory programming course (CS1) is an integral part of any undergraduate curriculum. Due to large number and diverse programming background of students, providing timely and personalised feedback to individual students is a challenging task for any CS1 instructor. The help provided by teaching assistants (typically senior students) is not sufficient as it suffers from unintentional bias and, most of the time, not quick enough. In this paper, we present Prutor, a tutoring system platform to conduct introductory programming courses. Prutor is a cloud-based web application that provides …
Replacing ANSI C language with other modern programming languages such as Python or Java may be an actual debate topic in technical universities. Researchers whose primary interests are not in programming area seem to prefer modern and higher level languages. Keeping standard language ANSI C as a primary tool for engineers and for microcontrollers programming, robotics and data acquisition courses is another strong different opinion trend. Function oriented versus object oriented languages may be another highlighted topic in actual debates.
