This course introduces students to the principles of computation. Upon completion of 6.001, students should be able to explain and apply the basic methods from programming languages to analyze computational systems, and to generate computational solutions to abstract problems. Substantial weekly programming assignments are an integral part of the course. This course is worth 4 Engineering Design Points.
Since programmers often build task-specific tools, one way to make them more productive is to give them better tool-making tools. When tools take the form of program generators, this idea leads to libraries for creating languages that are directly extensible. Programmers may even be encouraged to think about a problem in terms of a language that would better support the task. This approach is sometimes called language-oriented programming
When John McCarthy in 1960 wrote his famous paper on the programming language LISP, he used a particular function to illustrate what you could do with the