This coming semester, Fall 1998, I would like to experiment with letting you and the other students in the course decide on broad directions of what you want to learn. I can teach almost anything in the subject area, so I would like to have the course be directed by negotiation between us. This may mean that we focus, say, on language design more than theory. But I think it will be more interesting if you and your classmates help decide on what you want to learn and why.
One reason for doing this is to place more emphasis on the process of discovery. Ideally, you should discover and recreate for yourself some of the fundamental problems in language design, the techniques used to solve them, and the remaining problems in language design and specification.
If you are planning to take the course, take a look at the Fall 1997 and other offerings for a sampling of what the course could be like, and think about what you would like to learn ahead of time.
I suspect that we'll negotiate something similar to what we did last year for 541. This involved object-oriented programming, functional programming, and a bit of logic programming. I have an idea to teach a constraint logic programming language (perhaps AKL as part of the course, if you're interested. But, as I said, I'm open to suggestion and negotiation,a and I look forward to developing the course together.