Re: How should DoD further Ada education?

[doug@bear.cis.ohio-state.edu (Doug Kerr)]

In article <2289@aldebaran.cs.nps.navy.mil> schweige@taurus.cs.nps.navy.mil (LCDR Jeff Schweiger) writes:
>This is primarily geared to the Ada educators on the net, but comments from all 
>are welcome.
>
>The following questions have been discussed on the net in the past, but I have
>a short notice opportunity to include them in a study tasked by OSD.  I 
>appreciate any responses offered.
>
>1.  What role should DoD play in expanding software engineering education,
>using Ada as the implementation language?
For us to consider using Ada as our basic instructional language (we
now use Modula-2) we would need the following:

  A. Good introductory textbooks including introduction to algorithm
  development and also introduction to data structures.

  B. Beginner friendly software running on Unix workstations under
  HPView, LookingGlass or some other icon based interface.  By "beginner
  friendly" I mean features similar to those in Think Pascal for the
  Mac.  We want our students in our first two courses to have as little
  to do with Unix as possible.  (You may ask then why not just use a
  Mac?  The answer is that we want to develop tools underneath and Unix
  workstations are oaur standard.  Also we teach about 2000 students a
  quarter in various low level courses and the mac file service does not
  scale up to this level.)

  C. The language system should compile quickly for the relatively small
  programs students will be writing.

  D. Software priced competitively with Mac software.  Note that lowend
  workstations are already priced competitively with medium and highend
  Macs. 

>
>2.  How best should DoD carry out this role?
>	(ie., financial support for faculty, course development, hardware,
>	 software, etc. or more direct course development support)

  I would suspect the biggest problem for us is the compiler and
  language environment.  Thus I'd suggest supporting such an effort.
  I'd guess books will be written if the environment is there.

>
>3.  How do we expand the number of Ada-literate people coming out of the
>universities?

  The only way to get a significant increase in such people is to get
  Ada adopted as the language in the first course, or at least the first
  Algol derivative language.  (Some universities start with Scheme.
  They could go to Ada as their second language.)

>
>4.  How do we expand the use of Ada in information systems?

  I teach such courses here.  We would use Ada if that's what the
  students knew coming into the course.  We won't introduce a new
  language in this type of course, files, databasess, systems analysis.

>
>5.  What can or should DoD do in conjunction with industry to further Ada usage?

--
 Douglas S. Kerr, Department of Computer and Information Science
 The Ohio State University; 2036 Neil Ave. Columbus OH USA 43210-1277
 doug@cis.ohio-state.edu                    614/292-1519
 ...!pyramid!osu-cis!doug