Re: Help me with Educational Use for Ada on Sparcs

[seas.gwu.edu!mfeldman@uunet.uu.net (Michael Feldman)]

In article <1992Oct28.001306.21569@beaver.cs.washington.edu> pattis@cs.washingt
on.edu (Richard Pattis) writes:
>
[good stuff deleted]

>FYI: The primary growth language in CS 1/CS 2 are Ada and Scheme. C/C++ looks
>to have a bright future (all the publishers are lining up books) but it is
>still unproven in these courses compared to Ada and Scheme (about 50 schools
>seem to use Ada/Scheme). Pascal is still dominant, but not growing.

You probably meant to say that about 50 schools use Ada in CS1 and about 50
schools use Scheme. This is the case, according to the latest Reid Report.
Actually, the Ada number is closer to 60, including the military academies
of Australia and Belgium. I guess those foreigners must be far more
primitive than us Americans - our military academies must be much too
advanced to use Ada in CS1 :-)

Adding another 40 or so schools that don't use Ada in CS1 but introduce it
in CS2 (including the Air Force Academy but not the others), we actually
get about 100 colleges and universities doing first-year Ada.

The Reid Report shows 22 C schools and 6 C++ schools, so
currently, about twice as many schools use Ada in CS1 as use C and C++
combined. The current Reid Report summarizes data submitted voluntarily
over the net by 331 schools. I don't know whether the data is 
representative of the other languages. The Ada information is
authoritative. Reid and I shared our data; my data came from CREASE, 
Reid, my own gleanings, publishers, etc. I don't think we are missing
a lot of Ada schools.

The Reid Report covers _only_ CS1, by the way. Copies on request.

Mike Feldman
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael B. Feldman
co-chair, SIGAda Education Committee

Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
School of Engineering and Applied Science
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052 USA
(202) 994-5253 (voice)
(202) 994-5296 (fax)
mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)

"Americans wants the fruits of patience -- and they want them now."
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