1. INF 212 Analysis of Prog. Langs Final Lecture
Instructors: Crista Lopes
Copyright © Instructors.

2. Course Objectives Understand concepts in PLs
100’s of PLs, all look different  they aren’t that different
Appreciate history, diversity of ideas in PLs
Be prepared for new languages
Ignore sales pitches
Be rigorous (PLs are a good example)
Certain times, you cannot afford to be fuzzy
Learn some important facts about existing language systems and techniques
Learn and think critically about tradeoffs

3. The Course Mathematical Foundations Funktional Programming Pearls
Lambda calculus
Operational Semantics
Funktional Programming Pearls
Closures, continuations, iterators, generators, monads
Reflection
Meta-circular interpreter, eval, reification, intercession
Type Systems
Type checking, type inference, polymorphism
Modularity
Different ways of decomposing problems
Virtual Machines
Purpose, under the hood
Program [static] analysis

4. Programming Languages
Universe of design ideas
Crazy concepts often became mainstream
E.g. garbage collection, recursion, closures, …
(other crazy concepts were just crazy)
Language design concepts often pop out into systems design concepts
E.g. Map-Reduce, stateless – REST, …

5. What’s new in programming languages
Commercial trend over past 5+ years
Increasing use of type-safe languages: Java, C#, …
Scripting languages, other languages for web applications
Teaching trends
Java replaced C as most common intro language
Less emphasis on how data, control represented in machine
Research and development trends
Modularity
Java, C++: standardization of new module features
Program analysis
Automated error detection, programming env, compilation
Isolation and security
Sandboxing, language-based security, …
Web 2.0
Increasing client-side functionality, mashup isolation problems

6. What’s worth studying? Dominant languages and paradigms
Leading languages for general systems programming
Explosion of programming technologies for the web
Important implementation ideas
Performance challenges
Design tradeoffs
Concepts that research community is exploring for new programming languages and tools
E.g. Multi-core

7. Questions Projects: Easy? Hard? OK? Which project(s) didn’t you like?
Which project(s) did you like best?
Did you read the suggested readings?
Suggestions for next year’s offering