A Programming Languages Course for Freshmen

摘要

Programming languages are a part of the core of computer science. Courses on programming languages are typically offered to junior or senior students, and textbooks are based on this assumption. However, our computer science curriculum offers the programming languages course in the first year. This unusual situation led us to design it from an untypical approach. In this paper, we first analyze and classify proposals for the programming languages course into different pure and hybrid approaches. Then, we describe a course for freshmen based on four pure approaches, and justify the main choices made. Finally, we identify the software used for laboratories and outline our experience after teaching it for seven years.