Manifest: Thursday 27 April 2000

Assignments Due
Friday, 28 April	Project Final Report
Monday, 1 May, 6:30-8pm	Project Rotunda Presentations
Sunday, 7 May - Wed, 10 May	Final Exam (turn in your choices before leaving today)

Monday, 1 May at 6:30. Groups will present in reverse numberical order (Group 6 first). I will provide a laptop projector and a laptop with PowerPoint. If you want to use this to project your slides, come with a floppy disk containing your presentation.

Each group should present for about 15 minutes (no more than 20), followed by a question period. Not every group member needs to speak --- having one speaker is fine, two is probably ideal.

Specific talk advice:

• Average 2 minutes per slide. For a 15 minute talk, you should not have more than 8 slides.
• Keep your slides simple; don't read your slides.
• Don't get mired in technical details. Try to convey one technical nugget.
• Figure out the most important point you want to make. Memorize how you will make it.
• Practice. I will be available to help with talks Sunday night, 6pm-midnight.

• What are the advantages and disadvantages of non-textual program syntaxes?
• How might we program amorphous computing stuff?
• What is declarative programming?
• What is declarative programming good for?
• How does Prolog separate logic and control?

Most computer technologists don't like to discuss it, but the importance of beauty is a consistent (if sometimes inconspicuous) thread in the software literature. Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology . . . Beauty is important in engineering terms because software is so complicated . . . Beauty is our most reliable guide to achieving software's ultimate goal: to break free of the computer, to break free conceptually. Software is stuff unlike any other . . . Software's goal is to escape this gravity field, and every key step in software history has been a step away from the computer, toward forgetting about the machine and its physical structure and limitations -- forgetting that it can hold only so many bytes, that its memory is made of fixed size cells, that you refer to each cell by a numerical address. Software needn't accept those rules and limitations. But as we throw off the limits, what guides us? How do we know where to head? Beauty is the best guide we have.
David Gelernter

University of Virginia CS 655: Programming Languages

cs655-staff@cs.virginia.edu Last modified: Mon Feb 26 12:48:25 2001