Reasons for Studying Concepts of Programming Languages
It is natural for students to wonder how they will benefit from the study of programming
language concepts. After all, many other topics in computer science
are worthy of serious study. The following is what we believe to be a compelling
list of potential benefits of studying concepts of programming languages:
• Increased capacity to express ideas. It is widely believed that the depth at
which people can think is influenced by the expressive power of the language
in which they communicate their thoughts. Those with only a weak
understanding of natural language are limited in the complexity of their
thoughts, particularly in depth of abstraction. In other words, it is difficult
for people to conceptualize structures they cannot describe, verbally or in
writing.
Programmers, in the process of developing software, are similarly constrained.
The language in which they develop software places limits on
the kinds of control structures, data structures, and abstractions they can
use; thus, the forms of algorithms they can construct are likewise limited.
Awareness of a wider variety of programming language features can reduce
such limitations in software development. Programmers can increase the
range of their software development thought processes by learning new
language constructs.
It might be argued that learning the capabilities of other languages does
not help a programmer who is forced to use a language that lacks those
capabilities. That argument does not hold up, however, because often, language
constructs can be simulated in other languages that do not support
those constructs directly. For example, a C programmer who had learned
the structure and uses of associative arrays in Perl (Wall et al., 2000) might
design structures that simulate associative arrays in that language. In other
words, the study of programming language concepts builds an appreciation
for valuable language...