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Programming languages in a liberal arts education

Published: 30 November 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Liberal arts curricula emphasize breadth of a student's educational experience, critical reasoning, and intellectual discourse to a greater degree than pre-professional training or engineering programs. This substantially impacts how the topic of programming languages (and computer science in general) is taught. We highlight some key aspects of teaching programming languages in a liberal arts program, and we discuss why we believe this approach prepares students for problems they will encounter throughout their careers.

References

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Kim Bruce. CSC 131: Principles of programming languages. Course website at http://www.cs.pomona.edu/~kim, 2008.
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Liberal Arts Computer Science Consortium. A 2007 model curriculum for a liberal arts degree in computer science. J. Educ. Resour. Comput., 7(2): 2, 2007.
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Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat. MapReduce: simplified data processing on large clusters. Commun. ACM, 51(1):107--113, 2008.
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Stephen Freund. CSCI 334: Principles of programming languages. Course website at http://www.williams.edu/~freund, 2008.
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Jr. Guy L. Steele. Growing a language. Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation, 12(3):221--236, 1999.
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Norman E. Gibbs and Allen B. Tucker. A model curriculum for a liberal arts degree in computer science. Commun. ACM, 29(3):202--210, 1986.
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Daniel H. H. Ingalls. Design principles behind Smalltalk. BYTE Magazine, August 1981.
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The Pomona College curriculum. At http://www.pomona.edu/ADWR/Registrar/Overview/Curriculum.shtml, 2008.
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Bjarne Stroustrup. The design and evolution of C++. 1994.
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Williams College mission statement. At http://www.williams.edu/, 2008.
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Henry MacKay Walker and G. Michael Schneider. A revised model curriculum for a liberal arts degree in computer science. Commun. ACM, 39(12):85--95, 1996.

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 43, Issue 11
November 2008
137 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1480828
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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 30 November 2008
Published in SIGPLAN Volume 43, Issue 11

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  1. programming languages curriculum

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