Info needed

I need references discussing the place of pl education in the CS curriculum.

Also: Which top universities (e.g., MIT, Yale, Stanford, Harvard, etc.) require (or don't) a PL course in their undergrad curriculum?

Thanks!

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Not top schools?

Are you interested in other schools as well?

If yes, then BSCS program (in Latvian) in the University of Latvia devotes just 2 out of 165 points to Programming Languages. That roughly represents the percentage of time... At least it's in A category (mandatory for the degree). Also, I hate to admit it, but lately there are a lot of courses like "NT administration" and "Oracle" and "VisualBasic" (though they keep them as optional... yet).

(sorry, they don't have much info in English).

Cornell

By "PL course", do you mean "PL theory course"? Or just a programming course?

I was an undergraduate at Cornell from 1990-95 and there was no required PLT course for CS majors.

There was one course on programming, which used a local variant of Scheme (called Mindy, I think); and there was a course on concurrent programming, which used C. There was a course on numerical algorithms, but I don't remember if it actually involved any programming; mostly what I recall from that is upper triangular matrices and gaussian elimination.

For current information about the CS courses, see here. You may find Developing Programming Language Skills of particular interest.

PLT courses

I mean course about programming languages as a field of study.

Major styles: survey courses covering several languages/paradigms (I don't like this style, myself); EOPL based course; SICP based courses (many don't use SICP for CS1, instead they use it to teach about interpreters and pl constructs).

Obviously, these aren't the only possible choices.

SICP

The Scheme course I mentioned used SICP.

Update: I think it was CS 211. Now it seems they are using Java. (When I was there, OO was not taught, as part of the core, at least.)

Nothing?

I really need the help on this one. Any info is really welcome. If you prefer - email me.