Computational Thinking in Language Design

Alfred Aho, Columbia University

Creating and implementing a new programming language is an exercise in computational thinking. This talk looks at how computational thinking pervades the process of designing and implementing a programming language and how students can learn computational thinking by creating their own languages.

Speaker Biography

Alfred V. Aho is the Lawrence Gussman Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. Prior to joining Columbia, Prof. Aho was the director of the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs, the research center that invented Unix, C, and C++. Prof. Aho is well known for his many papers and textbooks on algorithms, data structures, programming languages and compilers. He created the Unix programs egrep and fgrep and is a coauthor of the popular pattern-matching language AWK. Prof. Aho is a Fellow of the ACM, AAAS, Bell Labs, and IEEE. He has been awarded the IEEE John von Neumann Medal and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.