Programming language concepts for software developers. White paper for SIGPLAN workshop on programming language curriculum, Harvard University, May 29-30 2008.

This note describes and motivates our current plans for an undergraduate course on programming language concepts for software development students. We describe the competences we expect students to acquire as well as the topics covered by the course. We plan to use C# and Scheme as instruction languages, and will study the implementation of Java and C# with their underlying platforms, the Java Virtual Machine and .NET Common Language Runtime. We emphasize implementation exercises and experiments. This comes at the expense of classical compiler course subjects such as register allocation and optimization of imperative loop-intensive code.