Re: Ada as a beginning language

[beidler@guinness.cs.uofs.edu (Jack Beidler)]

I have found the several postings regarding Ada as a beginning
language to be quite interesting.  Let's take a more careful look
at this issue.  My favorite statement regarding the use of 
programming languages in computing courses has been to the effect
that the choice of the programming language should be secondary.
The primary issues in the various courses should be conceptual issues.
The programming language should serve a supporting role.  At best
the programming language should provide direct support to the 
concepts.  At worse, the programming language should not get in the
way (with contrived syntax and parens all over the place and use the
word "void" in weird places because you have to and ...).

But I've been told that we all think in languages, therefore, the
choice of programming language in the first course is very critical
because it will biase the way students think about algorithm
development.  There first programming language becomes the way they
think about representing algorithms.  If the first programming
language does not have a good safe syntax, the result is a less
disciplined programmer.  I'd prefer a meaningful syntax error at
compile time to spending my life hacking away with a debugger as
a method of developing software.

The issue is discipline.  A well disciplined programmer can work 
safely with almost any language.  But in the beginning courses the
programming language and the support environment must be such that
disciplined is encouraged.  The best choice for a beginning language
is (1) a language that encourages discipline to hacking, (2) a 
language with a safe meaningful syntax, and (3) a language that 
provides direct support to a broad variety of software development
concepts.  That language use to be Pascal, it is now Ada.
-- 
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|  John (Jack) Beidler				                   |
|  Prof. of Computer Science Internet: BEIDLER@JAGUAR.UOFS.EDU     |
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