First, fork this repo in GitHub into your own account. You can choose to do additional collaboration with your team members, via branching, or other GitHub/git functionality -- that's up to you.

Work on the repo. Start by copying the sample-talk directory to a directory at the same level, but one that uses your presentation group name. So for example if your group name is "Perils of Python", you should create a directory perils-of-python. Use git add and git commit to commit any files in this directory. We need different group directories so we can merge it one collective repo by the end.

Lastly, submit a GitHub pull request so it can be merged in with this repo. You may need to push additional changes until you are completely finished -- or if we have further questions for you.

In your lightning talk you will present on how a specific concrete language feature -- syntax and corresponding semantics -- is added to a given language.

Consider the context. Successful programming languages tend to evolve over time, especially as part of their overall developer community. Some languages use standards committees to represent this community; others use more informal processes, such as mailing lists and issue trackers. Either way, any potential evolution is frequently encapsulated into a change proposal, which the community can evaluate, discuss, and further enhance. Frequently the change proposal is rejected outright, but sometimes it may live on in some other way, or even influence another language.

For the lightning talk pick a language from the set of Java, JavaScript, Python, or Scala. Restrict the change proposals to those that are proposed for one of the following versions:

• Java 8 or Java 9
• JavaScript, as defined by EcmaScript 6 or EcmaScript 7
• Python 3.3, 3.4, or 3.5
• Scala 2.10, 2.11, 2.12

This change must be substantive; and it must reflect a change in both syntax and semantics of the language. For Scala, such syntax changes can of course be implemented by Scala's support of internal DSLs. What is substantive can perhaps be best illustrated by a counter example: "Floating point and octal literal syntax deprecation in Scala 2.10" is not a sufficiently substantive topic.

This change proposal may be currently in a proposed state, or it may now be rejected, accepted, or implemented. You may find it most straightforward to write about accepted proposals that are now implemented. However, rejected proposals may be of especial interest if the language later returned to that proposed idea, but in some other way.

Change proposals may be in the form of a PEP, SIP, JEP, JSR, or similar document. You will want to also discuss primary sources like development mailing lists to find out about what was said about pros and cons. You may want consider subsequent proposals that cite the proposal as part of the development of your theme.

It's up to you what aspects of the syntax and semantics to present, but regardless describe using sample code and/or test cases. It's best to keep with the formalism of the change proposal itself, but if you want to elaborate using judgments and inference rules as motivated by the class, that can be a great apect of your talk.

Your work is public and will be presented in class. All presentation material, including especially titles and other wording (and this includes all GitHub identifiers), should be acceptable for presentation at a professional conference.

For the lightning talk mini-project, you will create the following aspects of your presentation:

• A 5 minute, 20 slide talk on your topic to be given in class/recitation; then posted publicly on YouTube, using a steady camera and clear sound. In either case, slides will be advanced every 15 seconds automatically. This means your lightning talk follows an Ignite style presentation format.

• Generate your slides using the Markdown markup language. A template is provided in this repo.

• Merging your work, via a pull request, in the corresponding GitHub repo for the course. This merged work will contain the source for the slides in your talk, including Markdown text, code samples, and any images.

Be creative and have fun!

Please note the revised dates:

• Thursday April 14 at 6 pm - topics should be picked after consultation with your TA

• Monday April 18 at 6pm - pull requests are submitted against the class repo with the contents of your presentation.

• Week of April 18 - presented in class or during recitations

• April 25 at 6pm - corresponding YouTube videos are posted by each team

Your team's presentation on this change proposal should exhibit the following characteristics:

• Apply the terminology and concepts we have used throughout the course. If language feature Baz supports higher-order functions, and takes advantage of nested scopes and currying, state so in such terms and concepts. If feature Bar provides syntax that makes certain common tasks easier or less error prone in the language, perhaps describe the syntax in the context of allowed grammar productions.

• Provide supporting code examples, diagrams, and other evidence. Such examples can be original to you or can come from the change proposal and any corresponding discussion.

• Cite supporting evidence using primarily primary sources from the community of the language being investigated.

• As usual, academic standards of plagiarism and attribution do apply.

When citing evidence, you should look for authority over form. For your presentation, blog posts and their comments, emails in mailing lists, and Q&A in StackOverflow-type sites are valid primary sources, even if informal, along with articles and books. What matters here is the content of the discussion and where it went. Consider carefully the author of the source, and its centrality, in the conversation. In addition, do filter out noise and irrelevance. Careful selection and presentation are important parts of what we will evaluate.

Presentations must be written in Markdown, specifically using the GitHub dialect. However, you are allowed to embed Latex for mathematical notation, as you see fit, using the following convention from Pandoc: $ <latex goes here> $. (GitHub used to render such notation with MathJax, and it's a major missing feature for us at this time.)

Use Markdown fences to demarcate code examples. Select the proper language (java, javascript, python, scala):

````python
def f(x):
    return x * 2
````

Under no circumstances should you embed code samples in your presentation as an image! (This admonition is based on previous experience. But seriously it's so much easier to do it the right way...)

Use backticks (`) to quote a short code fragment. So for example, here's the code fragment to show making a call to the above function: f(42), which can be written like so inline `f(42)`.

Introduce long quotes with >. Use endnote style links: use [text][optional-id-if-different] in the text, followed by an endnote with corresponding link at the end.

More on using Markdown in your presentation can be found at this useful Markdown cheatsheet.

Distill your inquiry into your topic to something to present to the class in a five minute slot:

• 20 unique slides, spaced exactly 15 seconds apart, for a total of 5 minutes. The Adobe PDF viewer can perform this autoplay, and we be using this feature in clas.

• This is a class about programming languages, so do show and talk about code! You want to find a good balance between describing a concept abstractly and demonstrating specific code usage in the language you're discussing.

• Slides must be written in Markdown, however, they can embed other media or use embedded Latex, much like the lecture notes do.

• Presentation is a PDF file generated via Beamer and pandoc; see the below section.

• Everyone on the team must be part of the presentation. Talk to an instructor if this is a problem.

The style we are requiring for this presentation is actually closest to the Ignite format, vs a typical conference lightning talk. I recommend this blog post as a good start: it walks you through the process of going from a storyboard to a finished product. You may also find that a short presentation can sometimes require more work than a longer presentation: that's the essence of getting your content distilled down.

Once you have practiced and gotten feedback on your presentation in front of the class, it's time to produce a video for upload to YouTube. This can be a simple screencast where you are narrating your slides; or you can also have video of the presenters. It's up to you. The important thing: all YouTube presentations must have good audio and nonshaky video. Slides must be clearly visible. And again, you will do this with an auto advance every 15 seconds.

Your presentation must be convertable to PDF by using the pandoc tool. You will use the same pipeline as I have used in generating lecture notes. Running

$ ./generate talk.md

will produce talk.pdf.

It's simple on Ubuntu, as might be expected:

$ sudo apt-get install pandoc
$ sudo apt-get install latex-beamer

For OS X, download and install the following packages:

1. pandoc DMG at https://code.google.com/p/pandoc/downloads/
2. BasicTex at http://www.tug.org/mactex/morepackages.html
3. MacTeX-Additions also at http://www.tug.org/mactex/morepackages.html

Then do the following:

$ sudo tlmgr install pgf
$ sudo tlmgr install pgf-umlsd
$ sudo tlmgr install xstring
$ sudo tlmgr install smartdiagram

$ ./generate  --help
usage: generate [-h] [--format FORMAT] [--incremental] source

Simple driver for pandoc. Or use pandoc directly for more options.

positional arguments:
  source             Source markdown file

optional arguments:
  -h, --help         show this help message and exit
  --format FORMAT    Output format
  --incremental, -i  Incremental display of lists

Here is a sample resource in where you should start in your investigation:

• Python uses PEPs (Python Enhancement Proposals) for language proposals. Two mailing lists are typically used, python-ideas and python-dev to discuss PEPs and their implementation. In addition, you may find the "What's new in Python x.y" useful in understanding the scope of changes; you may want to look at series of these "What's new" summations.

The other languages will have similar places to look.

Lastly:

• Be creative.
• Remember to have fun with your topic!