Analysis
What Is This Thread’s Purpose?
There’s a broad and exciting world of programming languages out there, and we can cover only a small part of it in the other threads. Therefore, we have this Analysis thread, which will have you read up on some materials and write prose and/or code responses. These will help you situate the course’s materials in the broader world of programming languages.
Making you reflect further on things you have already seen.
Making you prepare for things you will be seeing.
Bringing up new issues that we can’t cover in lecture or other assignments. The world of programming languages is extremely broad and has many fascinating ideas. Just because we can’t cover them elsewhere, within the constraints of the semester, doesn’t mean they aren’t important! Therefore, some assignments are designed to expose you to these ideas.
These should take only a few hours, including the reading. If you’ve spent more than five hours, come talk to us.
A few of these assignments require writing code, but they are meant to be quick-and-ready code, not of the same standard as in Implementation.
Most of them require writing prose. We place a high premium on the quality of your writing, while also valuing concision. This means: have a point; make it clearly; be brief; use proper punctuation and grammar; use paragraph breaks to avoid walls of text; and in general, write well, as if you were in a humanities class. Our standards are certainly that high.
Once again, we want to emphasize being concise. You rarely ever need more than 150-200 words, three paragraphs, or a few bullet points for any of these. Treat these as strong guidelines and only deviate if absolutely necessary. (But it’s also rare that you will need significantly less than this most of the time.)
CORR: The work was done correctly.
OFF: The work was fairly good but had some mistakes that we enumerate.
PROB: The work had notable problems, more than we can quickly enumerate. Please talk to a course staff member for help. Future work needs to be a lot better.
ZERO: The work was either completely off or missing.
ROBOT: The work looks like it was GenAI output. We expect the work to be your own. Please talk to a course staff member.
Each assignment is different, and will tell you what, if any, software you need.
The assignments will be published over the course of the semester.