Seminar Modern Programming Languages (Winter 2024/25)

Type:	Seminar
Programs:	BSc CS, ITS, AI
Organizer:	Michael Walter
Teaching Assistant:	Anurudh Peduri
Time and Place:	TBD
First meeting:	TBD
Credits:	3 CP
Contact time:	2 SWS
Language:	English
Course number:	212115
Links:	VVZ

Course Description

Computing is ubiquitous in our daily life; it pervades everything from mobile phones and embedded devices to supercomputers and cloud computing infrastructure. Given these vastly different platforms and use cases, there is a wide variety of programming languages - they differ in the target domains they are designed for, the paradigms they follow and the concepts they are built on, and the features and abstractions that they offer programmers to express computations clearly and robustly. In this seminar you will have the opportunity to explore a variety of modern programming languages and their key features.

The seminar has a limited number of participants. If you are interested, please send an email to Anurudh Peduri before September 15 with subject “Seminar Modern Programming Languages”. In your email, please include your study program and student ID. Signups are closed now.

How does it work?

You will each study one programming language, with an emphasis on certain key features (see the list below for possible choices). You will present the results of your investigations to your peers and also provide a written report. When preparing your report and presentation, please think carefully about the underlying motivations, fundamental concepts, instructive examples, and possible application scenarios. Work out similarities between the language that you are presenting and other languages that you know from your studies.

In addition, you will be asked to peer-review two of your fellow students’ contributions. This will allow you to learn from each other and get acquainted with good scientific practice.

This semester we will experiment with a new format. After the kick-off meeting, where topics will be distributed, there will be a mid-term meeting and a final session in the spirit of a block seminar, where everyone presents their results. Please check in again later this summer for more details.

Possible topics

Coq (concepts covered in the first three chapters in this book)
~~Go (error handling, defer, channels and goroutines, garbage collection, go generate)~~
~~Haskell (type classes, lazy evaluation, purity, IO and other monads, do notation)~~
Idris 2 (dependent types, multiplicities, theorem proving)
~~Julia (multiple dispatch, metaprogramming and macros, arrays, vectorization and broadcasting)~~
~~OCaml (type inference, algebraic data types and pattern matching, modules and functors)~~
Racket (tail recursion, pattern-based macros, continuations, contracts)
Rust (ownership and borrowing, error handling and ? operator, traits, smart pointers)
~~TypeScript (type inference and narrowing, generics, keyof, conditional types, mapped types, template literal types)~~
~~WebAssembly (virtual machine, instruction set, execution environment)~~
~~Zig (memory management, error handling, generics, comptime, reflection)~~
CUDA (a platform, not a language; programming model, kernels, C++ language extensions, tooling)
JAX (a DSL; autograd, vmap and pmap, XLA and jit, how it works under the hood)
~~GLSL (graphics pipeline, vertex/fragment/geometry/compute shaders, samplers, uniform, …)~~

Please contact us in case you would like to make your own suggestion.

Recommended prior knowledge

Good familiarity with at least one programming language (such as Python or Java) and programming paradigm (such as object-oriented or functional programming).

Learning outcomes

In this seminar, you will obtain insight into a variety of modern programming languages and some of their key features and concepts. This will help you prepare for a BSc project in the theory of programming languages, but also teach you practical skills that are useful in adjacent fields such as software engineering. In addition, you get to practice some fundamental skills: independent literature search and comprehension; distilling the essence of a research topic into a report; time management; giving feedback; the scientific peer-review process.

Assessment

Check back for more information soon.

Schedule