CS 217: Student Presentations

CS 217: Programming Languages

Student Presentations

This is your chance to learn about the a specific language in somewhat more detail, and present it to the rest of the class in a 10 minute presentation. This means that you'll have to do so in pairs. Find a partner in the class to work with, and let me know who it will be. I'm happy to play matchmaker if you can't find a partner - let me know. You can both speak for five minutes, or you can choose one of you to speak and the other to be "assistant." The important thing is that both of your efforts go into preparing the presentation.

There are 34 people in the class: this means that there will be 17 talks. These should be on Mondays or Wednesdays. As soon as possible, pick a Monday or a Wednesday on which you'd like to give your talk, and e-mail me. I'll let you know if you've got it, and indicate on the course web page which dates are taken and which are still available.

Every pair should talk about a different programming language. Therefore, it's first-come, first-served; the first pair to write to me indicating that they wish to talk about a given programming language has got it. You should choose from one of the languages listed below, which I've chosen as seventeen highly influential languages:

  1. FORTRAN (Aaron Miller / Brandon Tearse)
  2. ALGOL (August Schmitt / Forrest Sondahl)
  3. LISP & Scheme (Rachel Kirby / Jennifer Knutson)
  4. COBOL (Brice Keown / Josh Ourisman)
  5. APL (Janet Campbell / Pablo Galvan)
  6. SNOBOL (Seth Menning / David Seeling)
  7. SIMULA (Mike Ottum / Jess Rosenblatt)
  8. BASIC (Andy Exley / Ethan Sommer)
  9. PL/I (David Flynn / Xander Meadow)
  10. Prolog (Brendan Foote / Tim Whittemore
  11. Pascal (Tom Ashley / Ike Phelps)
  12. Smalltalk (Andrew Erickson / David Hendler)
  13. Ada (Jason Brown / Andrew Haynes)
  14. Standard ML (Aaron Jastram / Marie Joiner)
  15. Java (Brendon Stanton)
  16. C# (Andrew Owen / Brian Schilmoeller)

The order that the languages appear in class should be roughly historical. If you want to speak about an old language, you should plan on doing it early in the term. If you want to speak about a recent language, you should plan on doing it late in the term.

You should cover the following information in your presentation:

You can use section 1.3 in the textbook as a guide on the kinds of information you can include.

You should also prepare a handout for the class that is a reference card, or "cheat sheet," for the language itself. It should be no more than two sides of a sheet of paper, and should include the basics for someone who wants to get a flavor of what the language is like. Make sure to include your references on here as well.

I will be grading the reference cards and the presentations on content as well as presentation. I'll wait until the end of the term to set the grades, as relative quality matters. Keep in mind that the talk is only 10 minutes - I will be grading on choosing an appropriate amount of material for such a short timeframe. I'll also be a little more lenient in grading the first handful of presentations, as they will have the onus of going first.