17 Aug An overview of the language’s syntax and semantics.
Deliverables
You should present your findings in three ways:
- A short presentation during this class’s scheduled final exam period (December 16, 11:20am-1:50pm). Aim for around 10 minutes.
- A report of around 5-10 pages. The length isn’t as important as conveying an analysis of the language and report on your experiences, e.g. you might use more pages if you have a lot of figures. Reports are due by midnight on December 16.
- Some code you wrote in the language, either attached to the submission or as a link to a GitHub repository. For example a small app you wrote in the language, or several pieces of code trying out different features. It’s ok if you start with some tutorial or demo code, but in that case, explain what you changed, particularly to show that you used and understood the features of the language that you discuss in your report/presentation.
Contents of the presentation and report
What exactly you focus on can vary from language to language. But you should cover these things:
- The “what is this and who is it for” aspect of things: Who designed/designs the language? Is there an official standard? Is there one implementation or multiple? How are revisions to the language made, and who decides? What sort of community is there around it, and who does it target?
- An overview of the language’s syntax and semantics. This is the core “language” part. What does the language look like, and how does it work?
- A deeper dive into at least a few specific features of the language, ideally ones that either make it unique, or that it does a bit differently. For example, if you picked Kotlin (which is based on Java), you might highlight what’s different from Java. Or if you picked a music programming language, highlight what features make it different from a general-purpose language.
- When discussing specific language features, it’s often helpful to include a short code snippet in a figure, so that you can refer to a concrete example. However you shouldn’t include page-long code listings in the report, just enough to support the discussion.
Grading
The final project as a whole is worth 40% of your grade. This is broken down as follows:
- Overall analysis of the language: 15%
- Code written in the language: 10%
- Presentation: 5%
- Report: 5%
- Initial checkpoint: 5%
