CSCI 1951Q: Topics in Programming Languages, Fall 2025

Learning Goals

• Students will learn to understand program analyses in different theoretical frameworks.
• Students will learn how to implement these analyses for a simple imperative language.
• Students will gain exposure to the state-of-the-art in modern program analysis.

Assessment

Grades will be determined by a weighted average of assessments (60%), participation (15%), and a final project (25%). The participation grade will be determined based on student engagement during in-class research paper discussions. Assessments will be a mixture of hand-graded written problems and auto-graded programming problems. The final project will include an ungraded checkpoint for students to get early feedback on their progress.

Course Materials

There are no costs to take this course. All lecture notes will be made freely available online.

180 Hours of Work

Over 13 weeks, students will spend 2.5 hours per week in class (32.5 hours total). Required reading for the discussions is expected to take approximately 3 hours per week (39 hours). Assignments are expected to take approximately 8 hours per week for the first 10 weeks (80 hours). The final project is expected to take approximately 10 hours per week for the last 3 weeks (30 hours). Total: 32.5 + 39 + 80 + 30 = 181.5 hrs.

Attendance Policies

Students are expected to attend lectures and especially discussion seminars in-person. The listed deadline for all assignments is a recommended soft deadline. The hard deadline is no later than 2 days after the soft deadline. Further extensions are not guaranteed and will be provided on a case-by-case basis — contact Will as soon as you know that you need an extension.

Accessibility and Accommodations

Brown University is committed to full inclusion of all students. Please inform me early in the term if you may require accommodations or modification of any of course procedures. You may speak with me after class, during office hours, or by appointment. If you need accommodations around online learning or in classroom accommodations, please be sure to reach out to Student Accessibility Services (SAS) for their assistance (sas@brown.edu, 401-863-9588). Undergraduates in need of short-term academic advice or support can contact an academic dean in the College by emailing college@brown.edu. Graduate students may contact one of the deans in the Graduate School by emailing graduate_school@brown.edu.

Academic Integrity Policy

In general, it is acceptable to get help to a problem, and it is not acceptable to get a solution to a problem. This rule applies no matter whether you are consulting Google, an LLM, a TA, a fellow student, or any other resource. But remember: only your instructors and TAs are trained to help you without giving you the solution. We will not prevent you from using other resources, but you must be careful when using them. Specifically:

• It is acceptable to work on all problem sets in a group. It is acceptable to collaboratively generate ideas that help you make progress on an assignment. It is not acceptable for one person to solve a problem, and another person to copy their solution.
• It is generally acceptable to use search engines like Google and help sites like StackOverflow, especially for problems unrelated to the learning goals of the course. For example, if you get a mysterious compiler error, it’s acceptable to Google the error if you don’t understand the error after reading it. It is not acceptable to search for complete solutions to all or significant portions of an assignment.
• It is generally acceptable to use AI-based coding tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Cursor for either (a) getting help in the same contexts that you would use Google & StackOverflow, or (b) generating small snippets of code that you could otherwise write by hand. Is it acceptable to generate the entire solution to a problem using AI? Honestly, I am still on the fence. For now, I will not forbid this, but I will remind you: if the AI gets something wrong, that is now your problem and not the AI’s.

Bounties

• Bug bounty: If you find a bug that impedes your ability to finish an assignment, I will provide extra credit between 1 to 5 points depending on the severity of the bug. Report bugs by emailing Will or posting privately on Ed.
• AI bounty: If a problem is not explicitly marked as AI-solved, then I will provide extra credit for a demonstration (screen recording or exactly-reproducible actions) which completely solves the problem in a single prompt. Points will be awarded in inverse proportion to the complexity of the prompt.