Courses on programming languages are typically offered to junior or senior students or to working professionals, and textbooks are based on this assumption. However, our computer science curriculum offers the programming languages course to a wide variety of target audience. This unusual situation led us to design it from an untypical approach.

In this courses, we first analyze and classify proposals for the programming languages course into different pure and hybrid approaches. Then, we describe a course for the professional based on four pure approaches, and justify the main choices made. Finally, we identify the software used for laboratories and outline our experience after teaching it for the duration.