Teaching Programming with The Kernel Language Approach

We present the kernel language approach, a new way to teach programming that situates most of the widely-known programming paradigms (including imperative, object-oriented, concurrent, logic, and functional) in a uniform setting that shows their deep relationships and how to use them together. Widely-different practical languages (exemplified by Java, Haskell, Prolog, and Erlang) with their rich panoplies of abstractions and syntax are explained by straightforward translations into closely-related kernel languages, simple languages that consist of small numbers of programmer-significant concepts. Kernel languages are easy to understand and have a simple formal semantics that can be used by practicing programmers to reason about correctness and complexity. We hav