▼Hack Your Own Language
•Project Presentations
7.0.0.13
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Project Presentations

presentations

The Idea Presentation Memo You have between five and ten minutes to present your project idea. The ideal is closer to five than to ten minutes. See the margin notes for suggested "weights".

Your presentation has two goals and two parts. The primary goal is to bring across the "thesis" of your language L and to answer the following basic questions:

  • what does a L programmer write down?

  • what does the L language compute when an L program is run?

2 minutes

If you plan on running L programs inside of DrRacket—which as you now know is not about running just Racket programs—you may try to bring across what L programmers write down in the Definitions Area and what they see in the Interactions Area after clicking the Run button. Additionally, you may want to explain how an L programmer interacts with a program in the Interactions Area.

Some of you may wish to explain the language concepts as "our L is like (some existing language) LL but does not support X and Y from LL; instead it provides U and V." This is especially true if you imagine reusing LL to build L.

The secondary goal is to demonstrate that you have made some progress on the design of the language details. Point to your (local copy of your GitHub) repo and show how you defined:

  • the L vocabulary and grammar;

    4 minutes

  • the L scoping rules;

  • optionally, the L typing rules; and

  • the meaning of L programs.

The structure of your repo should reflect that these are design documents. Put them in a folder named Design/. Later on you will add folders for the implementation and documentation.

The Project Presentation Your project presentation must cover the following items:

  • the purpose of your language (as implemented and running),

  • a demo of a couple of sample programs in your language,

  • a look at the user documentation,

  • two interesting (as in error-prone) pieces of code, and

  • the missing pieces (or what you would like to accomplish before the end of the semester).

You should use slides for the first and last item. Present the documentation in a browser. Use drracket for any code.

The entire presentation, including interactions with the audience should take about 40 minutes. If you do not switch on your own, I will switch presenters at random points in the middle of your presentation to ensure that both understand the entire range of material.

This time I will leave the time allocation to you. Imagine yourself presenting the solution for a niche problem to a team of generally knowledgeable colleagues in a company, but these colleagues (other than your manage) do not know what you have been up to for a few weeksa. If there is time left, all of us will inspect additional pieces of your implementation.

Preparing your presentation You will deliver the presentation on one of your own laptops. Please check that you can connect to the overhead projector in the classroom at least a day before. You may even wish to practice the talk there.

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