Choosing a Language, CSC430, Spring 2023

8.9.900

Choosing a Language, CSC430, Spring 2023

Let’s start the course with some reflection on how you already think about languages. This is an essay question that does not depend on your technical depth around languages, only your personal experience so far. There are no wrong answers. You’ll be graded how you clarify and present your thoughts. We’ll also frame this discussion a bit during this week’s lectures, but the content of your essay is to be based on how you walked into this class. We expect a good response to be 500-700 words.

You’ve spent a lot of time in school being told what language to use, and thinking about languages as a user. It’s time to change both of those!

Following your stellar career as a rising star at MicroGoogleBook, you’ve been promoted to a managerial position! You have to choose one of these three projects:

a self-driving car,
an Instagram competitor, or
a mobile operating system

As manager you will decide what programming language will be used for the project. Keep in mind that you won’t actually be writing any of the code yourself (so sad!).

Structure your essay as a memo to upper management, containing two parts:

Part a. Identify and explain the criteria that are most important in making your decision.
Part b. Do one of two things: either suggest a programming language that might satisfy your criteria and explain why. [maybe second one as backup choice], or list two prominent but unsuitable languages and explain why they wouldn’t work.

1 Handing in your answers

We’re going to use DrRacket’s handin plugin to hand in these files. Include

#lang scribble/manual

... as the first line of your document, to indicate to DrRacket that this is a textual file.

Note that if you’re pasting text from an editor that automatically flows long lines of text, you’re going to wind up with some very long lines of text in DrRacket. Once you’ve set the language level by inserting the #lang line as described above, you should be able to use the "ESC-q" keybinding in DrRacket to automatically insert newlines.

That is: press and release the "ESC" key, then press "q".

Let us know if you have any questions!