Toward a Comprehensive Supplement for Language Courses

Information Systems are coded in a variety of programming languages ranging from production object-oriented languages to scripting languages to declarative languages. It is crucial that the programmers have a good understanding of the fundamental concepts, notations and techniques that underlie these languages and issues related to evaluating and choosing from among these languages. There exist many good textbooks andWeb-based resources for the study of comparative programming languages. In spite of these resources, however, students often fail to grasp the fundamentals and their application to both modern language implementation and their own problem solving skills. Modern languages are geared towards enhancing programmer productivity, sometimes at the expense of efficiency. For every language, paradigm, or style, there exists some application domain for which it is well-suited. We believe that a comprehensive set of programming exercises are needed that clearly bring out the role of each paradigm/language, especially the fact that they are complementary in nature rather than competitive.