17-396/17-696/17-960: Language Design and Prototyping

Tue/Thu 3:00-4:20pm in Wean 5302
Spring 2020
12 units

Professor Jonathan Aldrich
aldrich@cs.cmu.edu
Office: Wean 4216
Office hour: Fridays 1-2pm

Assignments:

Assignment 1: Language Proposal and Human Subjects Research Training. Due 2:30pm on January 21.
Assignment 2: Concepts for Language Design. Due 11:59pm on January 28.
Assignment 3: Language Semantics. Due 11:59pm on February 4.
- Resources: assignment source, style helper file, sample derivation (PDF, source)
Mini-Assignment 4 - Interpreter Warm-Up: Calculator. Due 11:59pm on February 6.
- Resources: zip of calc directory, zip of OO starter code, FP starter code
Assignment 5 - Functional PL Interpreter. Due 11:59pm on February 15.
Assignment 6 - Functional PL Interpreter Due 11:59pm on February 20. (note: this zip is the same as for Assignment 5. Take your Assignment 5 solution and build on it).
Assignment 7: Human Subjects Study Design. Draft due 3pm (start of class) on February 25. Revised version due 11:59pm on February 27.
Assignment 8 - Pattern Matching Language. Due 11:59pm on March 5.
Assignment 9: Human Subjects Study. Due 11:59pm on March 31 (or April 7 if you are doing Assignment 10 first).
- IRB proposal
- Consent form (PDF, DOC)
Assignment 10 - Transpiling an OO Language. Due 11:59pm on March 31 (or April 7 if you are doing Assignment 9 first).
Assignment 11 - Transpiling an OO Language, Part II. Due 11:59pm on April 14. The assignment zip file is the same as for Assignment 10.
Project - Design and Prototype Your Language. Milestone Due on April 28. Final presentations on May 7 starting at 8:30am. Final deliverables due May 12th at 11:59pm.
OPTIONAL: for fun, you can do the Logic Programming assignment from the UCLA version of this course (with thanks to Todd Millstein and Alex Warth)

Schedule

Jan 14	Course introduction
Jan 16	Concepts for Language Design
Jan 21	Project proposals
Jan 23,28	Formalism, e.g. Featherweight Java (paper), Evaluation and Typing Derivations (.txt) (view in fixed-width font)
Jan 30	Soundness; Assembly-like IR (see sections 2.2 and 3.1.3 of my program analysis book)
February 4	JavaScript; calculator example (calc.zip, web page)
February 6	Implementing an Interpreter in JavaScript (coverage of Assignment 6 constructs was deferred to Feb 11)
February 11	Big-step environment semantics
February 13	Introduction to User-Centered Programming Language Design
February 18	User-Centered Programming Language Design, part 2
February 20	User-Centered Programming Language Design, part 3
February 25	User-Centered Programming Language Design, part 4
February 27	Internal Domain-Specific Languages
March 3	Case Study: The Design of the Obsidian Language
March 5	Parsing
March 19	Pure OO PLs and Transpilation
March 24	Transpilation Demo ( txt notes, manual c translation, generated c, transpiler impl)
March 26	Corpus Studies for Programming Languages
March 31	Case Studies on Programming Languages
April 2	Language Expressiveness
April 7	Truffle: Partially Evaluating Interpreters
April 9	Glacier: Usable Enforcement of Transitive Immutability
April 14	Penrose: From Mathematical Notation to Beautiful Diagrams
April 16	Discussion: User Study results
April 21	Wyvern: Designing a Language for Security
April 23	The History and Impact of OO: Simula and Smalltalk
April 28	Programming Language Design and Performance. See also this lecture in my program analysis course for an example of getting high performance from using a DSL.
April 30	Perspectives on PL Design and Course Conclusion.
May 7	Final project presentations

FAQ

How is this different from 15-411 (Compiler Design)? 15-411 is all about compilers, and focuses on writing sophisticated compilers that produce good assembly code. In contrast, this class is also about design, and it focuses on writing very simple interpreters and transpilers that help you get a language running quickly so you can try it out!
How is this different from 15-312 (Foundations of Programming Languages)? 15-312 focuses on programming language semantics; there is an implementation component but it is very semantics-focused. We'll provide a brief overview of operational semantics as a tool for talking about what a language does, but this is only a small part of the course. This course will focus more on design issues, including how to describe and analyze the key concepts of a language and how to evaluate the design with users. We will also cover practical techniques for implementing a language quickly from the ground up so you can try it out.
Is there a final exam? No, we have a final project instead so you can design and implement a neat language of your own design!
What languages can we use? We'll teach prototyping based on JavaScript (with optional types, a la TypeScript), which is cool since you can try out your prototype in any browser! But if you prefer another language, you can use that instead.