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From: jnestoriak@vnet.IBM.COM
Message-ID: <19930401.155634.990@almaden.ibm.com>
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 93 18:54:56 EST
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Is General Kind the harbinger of doom for the Mandate?
Date: 1993-04-01T18:54:56-05:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

>: ... Anyone
>: who graduates from a decent University with a degree in Computer
>: Science who can't learn a new programming language in less than a
>: month must have slept through too many classes.
>
>Well, I had been a professional programmer for 7 years (Algol, FORTRAN, C,
>PL/M...) before immersing myself in Ada and it was probably a year before I
>felt that I was no longer learning important aspects of the language

Ok, after many contrary opinions, let me revise my original statement.

  1)Any computer science graduate with prior exposure to the
    "difficult" concepts in Ada (packages, generics, strong
    typing) should be able to become a productive Ada developer
    in a "short" amount of time.

  2)Good university programs will introduce all CS students to
    these programming concepts (though not necessarily in Ada).

  3)It will in general take people much longer to become
    competent software designers, and any given person is
    not guaranteed to become a good designer no matter how
    long and hard they try.

  I guess as CS grads go I had it rather easy learning Ada, as
I already knew SML (packages, generics, strong typing) and Pascal.
Ada to me was merely SML with Pascal syntax.  I also admit that the
project I work on doesn't use Ada tasking so that was one area of
the language I didn't have to learn.

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* These opinions are mine only.                     John Nestoriak *
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