Essay 1, CSC430, Fall 2020
1 Handing in your answers
7.8.0.11

Essay 1, CSC430, Fall 2020

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:

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 you can use ESC-q in DrRacket to automatically insert newlines, to simplify formatting. If pasting from another editor, use ESC-q to reformat the text (the handin server will reject lines that are too long).

Let us know if you have any questions!